Xavier University
Literary Reading Series
Henry Taylor is Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC., where he has taught since 1971. His third collection of poems, The Flying Change, received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; his first two, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), were reissued in one volume in 1992. His translations from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, as well as two collections by the Bulgarian poet Vladimir Levchev, the most recent being Black Book of the Endangered Species (Word Works, 1999). He has also published translations from Greek and Roman classical drama; his translation of Sophocles' Electra appeared (spring 1998) in the Sophocles, 1 volume of the Penn Greek Drama series. Another collection of poems, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996, appeared in the fall of 1996, and his collection of clerihews, Brief Candles, appeared this spring from LSU Press. He is now at work on a new collection called Crooked Run, titled after a creek in his native Loudoun County, Virginia; several of those poems have appeared in the past year in such journals as Missouri Review, Georgia Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review; they are represented here by "A Little Respect" and "The Dining Room at Springdale." He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing for the National Endowment for the Arts (1978 and 1986), a Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980-81), the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1984), and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association (1989).
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