Branching Out
Come join us for free talk on great poets.
Thursday, March 16, 2006 at the Woodward Park Library
- 6:30 PM – Music prelude by Hope Smith and Corey Whitehead
- 7:00 PM – Edward Hirsch will speak on Federico Garcia Lorca
Friday, March 17, 2006 at the Woodward Park Library
- Edward Hirsch will read and discuss is own poems.
About Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College
and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.
He is the author of six books of poems: Lay Back the Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf,
2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); The Night Parade (1989); Wild
Gratitude (1986), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and
For the Sleepwalkers (1981), which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from
The Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from
New York University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur
foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a Lila
Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He has been a professor of English
at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently
the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
About Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico Garcia Lorca , Spain’s greatest modern poet and playwright,
was born June 5, 1898 in the Spanish province of Granada. He began writing
poets in his late teens, reciting many of them in local cafes. In 1919 he left
to study law in Madrid. There he met and became friends with film director
Luis Bunuel and painter Salvador Dali. Lorca’s first book of poems was
published in 1928. In following years Lorca traveled to England, Cuba and the
United States. Shortly after the outbreak of Spanish Civil War, Lorca went
on vacation to Granada which had fallen to the fascists on the first day of
the conflict. Although Lorca had no political affiliations, he was known to
be a friend of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty. On or about
August 18, 1936 Lorca was arrested and executed by a right-wing firing squad.
The actual whereabouts of Lorca’s grave are unknown to this day.
