Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California, in the Mohave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, at Barnard College in New York City, and at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She subsequently lived in San Francisco and Bolinas, Chicago, England (London and Wivenhoe), again in New Yorkfor 16 years, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She considers herself to be geopsychically most connected to the Mohave, to New York, and to Paris; she is thus, through chance and fate, an international poet, and her work reflects a knowledge of several landscapes and cultures, in which she is both habitué and stranger.
Notley writes in a variety of genres and styles, often fictionalizing in verse, or mixing prose with poetry, and visiting as many imaginary, real, or disputed realms as she can locate. She is the winner of a number of prizes and awards, among them the Los Angeles Times Book Award (for Mysteries of Small Houses), the Griffin Prize (for Disobedience), and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize (for Grave of Light, Selected Poems 1970–2005). She is probably most well known for the epic poem, “The Descent of Alette.” Her most recent books are Culture of One, which is a sort of novel in poems, and the forthcoming “Songs and Stories of the Ghouls.”
This event is funded by the Creative Writing Program, the Henkels Lecture Fund, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the College of Arts and Letters.