The Department of English announces that the readers of the inaugural Ernest Sandeen Memorial Reading are Philip Levine and Christina Pugh. A hallmark of the Sandeen reading series is that the senior poet selected is asked to choose a younger poet to read with him or her on the same evening, thereby honoring the memory of Ernest Sandeen, who is renowned both as a poet and a professor for many decades at the University of Notre Dame. Levine and Pugh will share the microphone on November 5, 2014.
Former Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s most recent collection is News of the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Previous works include Ashes: Poems New and Old (Atheneum, 1979), which received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first American Book Award for Poetry, and The Simple Truth (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of the Frank O’Hara Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, and most recently, the Wallace Stevens Award.
Christina Pugh’s third book of poems is Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013). She is also the author of Restoration (Northwestern University Press, 2008) and Rotary (Word Press, 2004), which received the Word Press First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other publications, as well as in Poetry 180 and other anthologies. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America and the Illinois Arts Council, among others, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Consulting Editor for Poetry magazine.
Ernest Sandeen taught at Notre Dame for 50 years. Among the honors he won as a professor was the 1976 College of Arts and Letters Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching. He retired from teaching in 1978. His Collected Poems 1953-1994 was published in 2001. Sandeen published poems in such journals as Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.
The Chicago Tribune wrote, upon his death in 1997, “he liked to convene his poetry writing classes in the living room of his home, where he and his wife, Eileen, were the hosts of countless dinners that became legendary among students.”
The Ernest Sandeen Memorial Reading is funded by the Ernest Sandeen Endowment, the Sturtevant Fund, and The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Henkels Lectures Fund, with additional funding from the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.