Episode 058: Robert Hass

Robert Hass is the author of many books of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema; Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood; Human Wishes; Praise; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, whom you may find in our podcast archive, and he teaches at UC Berkeley.

Hass read from his work on October 20, 2011, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 054: Joseph Klein

Composer Joseph Klein holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Indiana University.  He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of North Texas College of Music, where he has served as Chair of Composition Studies since 1999.

Klein’s catalogue ranges from solo pieces to works for large ensemble, including instrumental, vocal, and electroacoustic music, often incorporating intermedia or theatrical elements, and reflecting his interest in systems and musical processes drawn from such sources as fractal geometry and chaos theory.  His compositions have been performed and broadcast throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and have been featured at national and international music venues.  He has been a featured guest composer at many institutions worldwide, has won numerous awards, and has released many recordings on the Innova, Centaur, Crystal, and Mark labels.

Klein visited Cornell having written short musical settings for poems written by Cornell’s second-year MFA poets, who performed the pieces with the composer on Friday, April 15, 2011 in McGraw Hall.  This interview took place the previous day, and includes recordings of the four pieces.

Episode 050: John Murillo

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. He is a visiting lecturer this semester at Cornell.

Murillo read from his work on November 4, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.

Episode 048: Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.  He teaches writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Phillips read from his work on October 14, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place earlier the same day.