Monday, September 22, 2003

WILMINGTON, NC—Christopher Ricks, a literary critic and professor, will hold a reading and discussion at the 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13 at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in King Auditorium, King Hall. Ricks will be giving a talk on “Poetry and Pain.” This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Buckner Lecture Series and the UNCW Department of English. A reception, at 3 p.m., will precede the discussion and a book signing will follow it.

Christopher Ricks has written ten books and has edited more than twenty-three others, including The Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Ricks is also the General Editor of Penguin’s English Poets series and Penguin’s Poets in Translation series. His three most recent books are Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Viking, 2003), Allusion to the Poets (Oxford University Press, 2002), and Reviewery (Penguin, 2003). Described by W.H. Auden as “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding,” Ricks has interests that span from John Milton to Bob Dylan, from Frederick Wiseman to Stanley Kubrick.

Best known in the United States and Great Britain as a literary critic, Ricks has also had a distinguished teaching career. Currently the William M. Warren and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, he has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Harvard and Stanford, among other universities. He has received numerous teaching accolades, including the N.E.H. Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities award at Boston University. More whimsically, former students have described him “as the greatest teacher in the post-Socrates era.”

The Buckner Lecture Series and the UNCW English department will sponsor this reading and discussion. Charles F. Green III established the Buckner Lecture Series, in honor of Katherine K. Buckner, to provide funding for distinguished guest presenters to visit UNCW. For further information, contact the UNCW English Department at 910/962-3320.