January 17, 2002 Poets David Lehman and Joshua Weiner to Read Their Poems

On Thursday evening, February 7, poets David Lehman and Joshua Weiner will read their poems at the Library of Congress. The program, presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, will be at 6:45 p.m. in the Montpelier Room on the 6th floor of the James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Tickets are not required.

David Lehman, born in New York City in 1948, graduated from Columbia College and attended Cambridge University in England as a Kellett fellow. His collections of poetry include The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000), Valentine Place (1996), Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). Among his works of criticism is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library. His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Mr. Lehman's awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at Bennington College and the New School for Social Research and divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

Joshua Weiner, who has recently joined the English faculty at the University of Maryland, was named by 1997-2000 Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to the 2000 Witter Bynner Fellowship, an honor he shared that year with Naomi Shihab Nye. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, was director of the writing program at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and has taught at Northwestern University. His first collection of poems, The World's Room, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press in 2001. As a Witter Bynner Fellow, Mr. Weiner coordinated the Favorite Poem Project reading at the Chicago Public Library in June 2000. He is also the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award; the PEN New England Discovery Award; the Ralph Samuels Fellowship in Poetry, Dartmouth College; the Dean's Dissertation fellowship, University of California; a Dissertation fellowship, Mellon Foundation; a Fellowship in Poetry, Fine Arts Work Center; the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, San Francisco Foundation; the Eisener Prize in Poetry; and the Academy of American Poets Prize, Northwestern University.