Award-winning poet Gerald Stern will read from his work for 40 minutes followed by an open-microphone session as part of Poets in the Library, Monday, September 8, at 7:30 p.m. His appearance will be in the library’s Community Room.

Mr. Stern was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, In Beauty Bright (Norton 2012) and Save the Last Dance (Norton 2009) as well as This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. According to prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, “Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it.”

About In Beauty Bright, Frank Wilson of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes, “[Stern’s] style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug.”

Besides receiving the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, Mr. Stern was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. He is also the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal. His new book of poems Divine Nothingness will be released in November.

Poets in the Library is co-sponsored by the library, Delaware Valley Poets and the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative.

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