Poet Kathleen Graber to Read at U.Va. on Sept. 26

Kathleen Graber, author of “The Eternal City,” a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry, will read from her work on Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. in the University of Virginia Bookstore, sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts & Sciences’ English department.

Graber, an associate professor who teaches in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, will be the first Rea Visiting Lecturer of the year and will talk also about the craft of writing with U.Va. creative writing students and faculty.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon chose Graber’s “The Eternal City” to re-launch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship. Her first collection, “Correspondence,” came out in 2006. She has had poems published in The New Yorker and American Poetry Review, among other publications.

From Princeton University Press’ website: “… ‘The Eternal City’ offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.”

To watch Graber read two poems from “The Eternal City,” click here.

The Rea Visiting Writers and Lecturers Series is funded through the Dungannon Foundation in memory of Michael Rea, an ardent supporter of the arts and U.Va.