New York University’s Creative Writing Program will celebrate the life and work of the late poet Tory Dent in a special memorial reading on Monday, May 1, at 8 p.m., in NYU’s Silver Center, Jurow Hall, 100 Washington Square East (at Waverly Place). The event is free and open to the public; for further information call 212.998.8816.
An alumna of the NYU Creative Writing Program, Dent detailed her struggle with HIV in many vivid and unflinching poems; she died in December 2005.
Poets featured in the memorial reading are: Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Hacker, Stanley Moss, and Marie Ponsot.
Dent is the author of three volumes of poetry: Black Milk; HIV, Mon Amour, which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals, the title taken from a slogan by the AIDS activist group Act Up. Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award; and three PEN American Center Grants for Writers with AIDS.
Dent’s work has appeared in such periodicals as Agni, Antioch Review, Kalliope, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and Partisan Review.
The NYU Creative Writing Program, with permanent faculty members E.L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall, Breyten Breytenbach, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds, has distinguished itself for over three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. The Creative Writing Program Director is Melissa Hammerle.