Evening Benefits the NYU/Goldwater Hospital Writing Project
On Thursday, April 24, at 7 p.m., New York University’s Creative Writing Program will host a reading and award ceremony to benefit the NYU/Goldwater Hospital Writing Project. Marie Ponsot, whose poetry collection The Birdcatcher won a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, will receive the 2008 Jean Kennedy Smith NYU Creative Writing Award of Distinction. Poet Phillis Levin will introduce Ponsot.
The event takes place in NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall, Greenberg Lounge, 40 Washington Square South (at MacDougal St.); voluntary donations are requested at the door. For further information, the public may call Danielle Veith at 212.998.8850; email danielle.veith@nyu.edu; or visit www.cwp.fas.nyu.edu.
The award ceremony will include a reading by writers from the NYU/Goldwater Writing Project - known as the Golden Writers; the presentation of the award; and a reading by Ponsot. The project provides writing workshops for residents of Coler Goldwater, a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged. The workshop teachers are graduate students in NYU’s Creative Writing Program, and the proceeds from the benefit reading will provide fellowship support for these students in their continued work with Goldwater’s Golden Writers.
Ponsot is the author of several books of poetry, including Admit Impediments, The Green Dark, and most recently, Springing: New and Selected Poems. She has also co-authored two books on teaching writing, The Common Sense and Beat Not the Poor Desk, recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Minna Shaughnessy Medal. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is the translator of several dozen books including Fables & Tales of La Fontaine, and she has received the Robert Frost Medal, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, and an NEA Creative Writing grant.