Poet and critic Susan Stewart will give a talk "The Ruins Lesson."  

Her most recent books of poetry are Red Rover (2008), which appeared in 2011 in Italian translation from Jaca Books, Milan; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest (1995). Her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, appeared in 2009 with Princeton University Press, and in 2012 she will publish two co-translations with the University of Chicago Press: with Sara Teardo, Laudomia Bonanni's novel The Reprisal, and, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, the most recent two books of poetry by Milo De Angelis - Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Her song cycle, "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009.

Her books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making, forthcoming in late 2011 from the University of Chicago Press; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art; and On Longing, Crimes of Writing, and Nonsense. A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart recently served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and in the Spring of 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This talk is free and open to the public.