Poets Tomaž Šalamun and Brian Henry to read from work April 3

March 27, 2008 -- Renowned Slovenian poet TomažŠalamun will join award-winning American poet Brian Henry for a reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 3.

The event, sponsored by the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences as part of its spring Reading Series, is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university's Danforth Campus. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives.

For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or email dschuman@wustl.edu.

Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Šalamun earned degrees from the University of Ljubljana in 1965 and the University of Iowa in 1972. He has lived on-and-off in the United States ever since.

Šalamun has published more than 30 books of poetry, including nine collections in English, most recently The Book for My Brother and Row (both 2006). Other volumes include Poker (2003), a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, and The Four Questions of Melancholy (1997), nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His latest volume, Woods and Chalices, is forthcoming in 2008.

Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, has called Šalamun "one of Europe's great philosophical wonders." His numerous honors include the Preseren Prize, the highest Slovenian award for artistic achievement, as well as the Jenko Prize, a Pushcart Prize and the Mladost Prize. In 1996 he became cultural attache to the Slovenian embassy in New York.

Henry, an associate professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia, has published five collections of poetry, including Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Quarantine (2006), The Stripping Point (2007) and In the Unlikely Event of a Water (2007).

Henry won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for Quarentine. Other honors include the Poetry Society's George Bogin Memorial Award, the Carol Weinstein Poetry Prize, and a Forward Prize nomination for Astronaut.