In 2014, The University of Texas at El Paso will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding in 1914 as the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy. Our Centennial offers not only an occasion to celebrate our distinguished history, but also a window through which we can begin contemplating our bright future as the first national research university with a 21st century student demographic. The Centennial Lecture Series invites noteworthy speakers to the UTEP campus to share their perspectives on a broad range of contemporary issues that are likely to impact our society, culture, and lives in the years ahead. We invite you to join us in exploring important and timely topics and in expanding our thinking about how they may help shape UTEP’s next 100 years.
President Diana Natalicio
The College of Liberal Arts Honors Program
and
The Creative Writing Department
cordially invite you to attend a
UTEP Centennial Lecture
“American Labor: Poetry for Whom There is No Poetry”
Philip Levine
18th Poet Laureate of the United States
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
5 p.m.
Undergraduate Learning Center, Room 106
UTEP Campus
Reception to follow presentation
The 18th Poet Laureate of the United States, Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit to Russian-Jewish immigrants and is known as the poet of the working class. The New York Times calls him “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland… quintessentially urban.” Author of 20 collections of poetry, his most recent are News of the World (2009), Breath (2004), and The Mercy (1999). Some of his most notable works are The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work is, which won the National Book Award; Ashes: Poems New and Old which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Book Award; The Names of the Lost, which won the Lenore Marshall Prize; and They Feed They Lion. He has also received the Ruth Lily Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit… sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage or the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence.” The Librarian of Congress states, “Philip Levine is one of America’s greatest narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’.” Levine has taught as writer and professor at many universities including Columbia, Princeton, Brown, and mostly at California State University Fresno and New York University.