Randy Cohen

Randy Cohen will interview  Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon and his wife novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz for his public radio program Person, Place, Thing on Monday, September 29 at 7 p.m. in the Community Room at the Princeton Public Library. Guests on the program are asked to speak about a person, a place, and a thing they find meaningful, rather than about themselves.

Paul Muldoon is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 university professor in the Humanities at Princeton and the founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts where he is a professor of creative writing. He is also the poetry editor for The New Yorker. His new collection One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Poems will be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in January. According to the publisher, “Muldoon can be somber or quick-witted — often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of “Cuthbert and the Otters” is ‘I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead,’ but that doesn’t stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes “are already dyeing everything beige/In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories.”

Nick Laird’s assessment, in The New York Review of Books, is that Muldoon is “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets,” an experimenter and craftsman who “writes poems like no one else.”

Publishers Weekly calls Jean Hanff Korelitz’s new novel You Should Have Known (Grand Central $26) an “excellent literary mystery” that “unfolds with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan.” Her 2009 novel, Admission, about a reader in Princeton University’s Office of Admissions, was made into a movie starring Tina Fey in 2013. Her other novels include The White Rose, The Sabbathday River, and A Jury of Her Peers.

Randy Cohen won multiple Emmy awards as a writer for Late Night with David Letterman and for 12 years wrote “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine.

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