Professor Faggen to Speak At PEN International Festival

Robert Faggen, professor of literature, will participate in the PEN International Tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, April 22 at Hunter College, New York City. The tribute, Czeslaw Milosz and the Conscience of Literature, is the concluding event of the annual PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature. PEN is an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.

Panelists include: Bei Dao, whose poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages; Durs Grunbein, youngest recipient of the Georg Buchner Prize; Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; Edward Hirsch, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Prix de Rome, and a MacArthur Fellowship; Eva Hoffman, Guggenheim Fellow and former senior editor and writer, The New York Times; Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose reportage in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and several books, have been translated into 19 languages; Azar Nafisi, Johns Hopkins University professor who was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil, frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic; Tomas Venclova, Yale professor, translator of Milosz, and pioneer in Lithuanian literature; Lawrence Weschler, 20-year staff writer at The New Yorker, author, and director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU; Leon Wieseltier, author and literary editor of The New Republic since 1983; and Adam Zagajewski, winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and recent guest of the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.

Professor Faggen is the author or editor of numerous books, including Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (University of Michigan Press); The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost; The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press); and he is currently at work on The Sparks Fly Up: The Life of Ken Kesey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A founder of the Milosz Archive and Institute, Faggen's interviews with Milosz appeared in The Paris Review and Books and Culture.

Faggen also organized the 1998 International Milosz Festival at CMC, featuring Seamus Heaney, Adam Zagajewski, Adam Michnik, and Milosz himself. Michnik, the 2005 Podlich Distinguished Fellow and noted Polish journalist, historian, and Solidarity leader, also spoke on campus earlier this month on The Legacy of Czeslaw Milosz.

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