October 13th, 2009
Award-winning poet Hoagland to give readings

Tony Hoagland will give two readings of his critically acclaimed poetry.

STAFF REPORT

Award-winning poet Tony Hoagland will read this week at Texas State and the Katherine Anne Porter House.

The Texas State reading will take place at the Witliff Collections at the Alkek Library Thursday at 3:30 p.m. His reading at the Katherine Anne Porter House will be Friday at 7:30 p.m.

The readings are co-sponsored b the Therese Kayser Lindsey Reading Series and the Texas State Department of English. They are free and open to the public.

Hoagland has written three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, Donkey Gospel and What Narcissism Means to Me. He has also written a collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistikashun. He has won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize. He was selected for the latter prize by the highly esteemed poets Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Ellen Bryant Voigt.

The academy prize in literature citation says, in part, “Hoagland’s imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, and kinds of speech lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild.” An example of his lyric whimsy can be found in his poem “Suicide Song,” in which he eventually contracts from suicide and asks “who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?”

Hoagland teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston. Examples of his work can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.