Dinner with W. S. Merwin

With a MacArthur Fellowship level contribution to the Inprint Annual Fund of $2,000 or more, Inprint gives you the opportunity to have dinner with one of the most accomplished and respected poets of our time, the celebrated U.S. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin.

You will be invited to have a scrumptious dinner at a private home with this literary hero, allowing you to get to know him on a more personal level. Mr. Merwin will be in Houston to read as part of the 2011/2012 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series on April 23, and this dinner will take place during his Houston visit. Invitations with the venue, date, and time will be sent to you at least two weeks prior to the evening. This will be an unforgettable experience and a dinner party you won't want to miss.

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W. S. MERWIN just completed serving as 17th Poet Laureate of the United States. During the last half century, Merwin has written more than 20 collections of poetry, nearly as many books of translations, and numerous prose works, and has won every major literary prize. He was first awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971 and won it again for The Shadow of Sirius in 2009, for which he also received the National Book Award. He was awarded his first National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Of this 540-page distillation of his poetry to date, one judge wrote, “The poems in Migration speak a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection.” His first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1952 by W. H. Auden. Peter Davison, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, says, “The intentions of Merwin's poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.” Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he works to restore and preserve the rainforests. Adrienne Rich wrote of Merwin’s work: “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.”