Poet Laureate Charles Simic to hold readings

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
University News Service
October 2, 2007

Charles Simic

The reading and signing will be held in the Southwest Writer’s Collection on the 7th Floor of Alkek Library on campus.

Simic will also have a reading and book signing 7:30 p.m. at the Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle on Oct. 5. All events are free and open to the public.

Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1953 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.

“A master of the surreal,” according to People magazine, “Simic packs his poems full of horror movies, bleak jokes, savage ironies, and the things an insomniac notices on the ceiling.”

His first poems were published in 1959, when he was 21. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than 60 books in the U.S. and abroad, among them My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award;  A Wedding in Hell (1994); Hotel Insomnia (1992); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Selected Poems: 1963-1983.