The Craft of Poetry

Esteemed American poet and critic Linda Gregerson discusses the craft of poetry with Writing & Society candidate Kate Middleton. Linda reads from her most recent poetry collection Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, followed by a Q&A.

Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry and two volumes of criticism.  Her second poetry collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and The Poets Prize; her third, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; her fourth, Magnetic North, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; her most recent, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2015 (reviewed in the New Yorker) . Gregerson’s essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in leading journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Her study of Renaissance literature, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995; Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry appeared from the University of Michigan Press in 2001.  Gregerson is also the editor, with Susan Juster, of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Gregerson’s is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Chair of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.