• the217
• Calendar
• CultureTalk: Merwin,...

Venue: Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Address: 500 S. Goodwin Ave. , Urbana

Venue Details: Colwell Playhouse

Cost: Free

posted 4:38 pm Jul 16
modified 4:43 pm Jul 16

This event, sponsored by Krannert Center, the Dean’s Office of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and the Center for Advanced Study, brings international-profile cultural figures to campus to discuss the evolving relationships between the arts and contemporary society.

Dante’s masterpiece The Divine Comedy will provide the basis for a conversation that coincides with the major academic conference “Translating the Middle Ages,” sponsored by the U of I’s Program in Medieval Studies and the Center for Translation Studies.

| FREE--Tickets Required. To request tickets, go to krannertcenter.com/tickets/

W.S. Merwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, has published over a dozen books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders and The River Sound, that have evolved from a medieval formality (echoed in his translation of Dante’s Purgatorio) into a more distinctly American voice.

Translator, essayist, teacher, jazz musician, and three-term US poet laureate Robert Pinksy founded the Favorite Poem Project, an online video database of ordinary people reading their most-cherished poems, and created the anthology Americans’ Favorite Poems, now in its 18th printing. He earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Translation Award for The Inferno of Dante.

Richard Powers, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Time Magazine Book of the Year honoree, U of I Swanlund Chair in English, and author of the landmark novel The Gold Bug Variations, will moderate this expedition into the center of Dante’s epic poem and its impact on literature, poetic structure, and the depiction of spirituality.

| FREE, tickets required. To request tickets, go to: krannertcenter.com/tickets/