University of Pittsburgh
March 22, 2009

Poet Paul Muldoon to Conclude 2008-09 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series Season With Reading at Pitt April 2

Irish-born poet described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War"
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PITTSBURGH-Poet Paul Muldoon, the 2008-09 William Block Sr. Writer, will give a literary reading at 8:30 p.m. April 2 in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 650 Schenley Dr., Oakland. The event concludes the 2008-09 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series season.

In a career spanning more than 35 years, Muldoon has amassed numerous awards and honors. In 2003, he won both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry for his collection "Moy Sand and Gravel"(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). He is a past recipient of the Shakespeare Prize, Aspen Prize for Poetry, American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 1997 "Irish Times" Poetry Prize, and the 1994 T.S. Elliot Prize, as well as fellowships from the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, Muldoon earned a BA degree at Queen's University in Belfast and was a radio producer for the BBC in Northern Ireland for 13 years before accepting a writer's residency at Cambridge University. As an academic, Muldoon held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College at Oxford. He is currently the Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and chair of Princeton's University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He also is a poetry editor for "The New Yorker".

Muldoon is the series eighth William Block Senior Writer, a title created to honor the former "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" publisher for his support of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers' Series. Former honorees have included Philip Gourevitch, Richard Ford, and Patrick McCabe.

The 2008-09 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series season is cosponsored by Pitt's Department of English in the School of Arts and Sciences, University Center for International Studies, Asian Studies Center, China Council Confucious Institute, Cultural Studies Program, Women's Studies Program, and Book Center and by the Carnegie Mellon University Creative Writing Program.

All events in the Writers Series are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Jeff Oaks at oaks@pitt.

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3/23/09/amm