Lowell Lecture
The Lowell Humanities Series and Poetry Days Present Laura Kasischke
Date & Time
Nov. 5, 2014
Location
Boston College - Gasson 100
140 Commonwealth Avenue Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Laura Kasischke
Presenting Organization
Topics
Poet and novelist Laura Kasischke was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. Her books of poetry include Wild Brides, Fire and Flower, Dance and Disappear, Gardening in the Dark, Lilies Without, and Space, in Chains, which won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award. Kasischke has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Juniper Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Rilke Poetry Prize from the University of North Texas. She has also won several Pushcart Prizes, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Kasischke's narrative expertise helps account for her dual career as a novelist. Her novels include Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzar, The Life Before her Eyes (subsequently made into a movie starring Uma Thurman), In a Perfect World, and The Raising. Taking on such subjects from global pandemics to school shootings, Kasischke's novels have enjoyed broad popular appeal. In the New York Times, Erika Krouse noted the poetic qualities of Kasischke's fiction: "It is not enough to say that Kasischke's language is 'poetic,' a word that has come to mean 'pretty.' Rather, her writing does what good poetry does - it shows us an alternate world and lulls us into living in it."