Robert Faggen, the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature, will be among a panel of poets, scholars, and translators honoring the legacy of poet Czeslaw Milosz during a memorial reading and celebration for the writer from 1 to 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 2 in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Main Public Library.
Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize recipient in literature, will be honored in the Bay Area, where he lived, wrote, and taught for most of the four final decades of his life. In addition to Faggen, featured presenters will include: Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States; Anthony Milosz, founder of the Milosz Archive and Institute; Mark Danner, writer and journalist; Norma Cole, painter, poet, and translator; Brenda Hillman, poet and educator; Jane Hirshfield, poet, translator, and essayist; Michael Palmer, poet and translator; Robert Kaufman, literary scholar; and Lillian Vallee, writer and translator. Presenters will speak of Milosz's work and life, as well as read from his poems.
The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library, the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, and Poetry Flash (http://www.poetryflash.org/).
Faggen edited Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, and is a founder of the Milosz Archive and Institute. His interviews with the late Nobel Laureate appeared in The Paris Review and Books and Culture. In 1998 he organized the International Milosz Festival at Claremont McKenna College with Seamus Heaney, Adam Zagajewski, Adam Michnik, and Milosz himself, with the proceedings published in Partisan Review.
Faggen is the author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (University of Michigan) and a forthcoming biography of author Ken Kesey for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His courses at CMC cover a broad range of subjects, including American literature, science and literature, Polish literature, contemporary Irish poetry, the Bible, rhetoric and oratory, and Milton.