Poet Donald Hall to read for annual Writers Harvest

Poet Donald Hall, the Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, reads from his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 24, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The public is invited to attend the event, part of the Writers Harvest, the annual literary benefit to fight hunger and poverty sponsored by the national hunger organization Share Our Strength (SOS). Donations will be accepted and proceeds will benefit the Good Shepherd Food-Bank, Auburn; the Lewiston-Auburn Food Pantry, Lewiston; and the Food Pantry at Trinity Jubilee Center, Trinity Episcopal Church, Lewiston.

New York Times reviewer Louis Menand called Hall’s book Life Work (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) “the best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always.” Awarded the New England book award for nonfiction, the poems examine Hall’s life as a writer. He lives in Danbury, N.H.

The author of 15 poetry books, Hall published Without: Poems (1998), about the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, from leukemia, and subsequently, The Painted Bed (2002), an exploration of grief and life after death: “You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.”

A native of New Haven, Conn., Hall published his first poem at age 16. He received his B.A. from Harvard and a B. Litt from Oxford. He has written short stories and plays, and books about baseball, the sculptor Henry Moore and the poet Marianne Moore. Hall is the author of various children’s books, including Ox-Cart Man (1979), which won the Caldecott Award. He has also written. He has edited various poetry anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (1990) and The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981) and served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1958 to 1964.

Hall received the National Books Critic Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The One Day (1988). The Happy Man (1986) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Exiles and Marriages (1955) was the Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956. The poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989, Hall’s other honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver Medal and the Ruth Lily Prize for poetry.

Each fall, Writers Harvest invites writers to fight hunger and poverty by reading from their works at bookstores, college campuses and community centers around the country. SOS distributes 100 percent of event donations to statewide anti-hunger and anti-poverty efforts. Since its inception in 1992, SOS’s Writers Harvest has raised more than $800,000 for the fight against hunger.