Pulitzer winners Dunn, Kooser to kick off Summer Writers' Conference

Pulitzer Prize winning poets Stephen Dunn and Ted Kooser, the U.S. poet laureate, will kick of the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference June 20 by reading from their work from 7-8:30 p.m. at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 12th and R streets. The reading is free and open to the public.

Dunn is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including "Local Visitations, Different Hours" (winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize) and "Loosestrife" (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, 1996). Some of his other books are "New & Selected Poems: 1974-1994," "Landscape at the End of the Century," "Between Angels" and "Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs." His newest collection is "The Insistence of Beauty" (W.W. Norton, 2004). Dunn's awards include the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Poetry Series winner, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and three creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is distinguished professor of creative writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Kooser, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of 10 full-length collections of poetry, including "Delights and Shadows" (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. His most recent book, on writing poetry for beginners, "The Poetry Home Repair Manual," was published by the University of Nebraska Press in January 2005.

For more information about the Nebraska Summer Writer's Conference, visit www.unl.edu/nsw on the World Wide Web.

The reading and reception are co-sponsored at UNL by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, the Friends of the Libraries, the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.

CONTACTS: Jonis Agee, Professor, English, (402) 472-1834;
Joan Barnes, Development & Outreach Librarian, UNL Libraries, (402) 47-26987; and
Margaret Rine, Coordinator, University of Nebraska Press, (402) 472-7946