Old Westbury, NY - October 28th, 2014 - Poet, essayist and critic Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, will give a reading on Thursday, November 13, at 3 p.m. at SUNY College at Old Westbury. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the New Academic Building, Room 1100.
“Bringing leading voices from all walks of life to our campus is a critical element in the academic and personal development of our students,” said College President Calvin O. Butts, III. “Through his poetry, Vijay Seshadri explores the panorama that is the American experience, at times exulting in our collective achievements while at other times exploring the depths of our challenges. I expect that, by looking momentarily through his lens, our students will get a glimpse of the world around them that they had never before considered.”
Seshadri is the author of three collections of poetry: 3 Sections, which was awarded the Pulitzer; The Long Meadow, which won the James Laughlin Award; and Wild Kingdom. The Pulitzer committee described 3 Sections as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”
Seshadri’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, The San Diego Reader and TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003.
He holds an AB from Oberlin College, an MFA from Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Seshadri has worked as an editor at The New Yorker and has taught at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.
Seshadri’s visit to Old Westbury is being sponsored by the College’s Office of the Provost, School of Arts and Sciences, and its English Department.
