News Release| Jean Burden Poetry Reading; Cal State L.A.

April 20, 2011

Note to reporters and journalists: To arrange an interview with Vikram Seth, please contact the CSULA Public Affairs office in advance at (323) 343-3050.

Best-selling novelist, poet to read from ‘The Golden Gate’ at Cal State L.A.

India’s Vikram Seth to present annual Jean Burden reading April 26 

Los Angeles, CA – Indian poet and best-selling novelist Vikram Seth will present this year’s Jean Burden Poetry Reading at California State University, Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 26, 6:30 p.m., in Cal State L.A.’s Golden Eagle Ballroom.

Seth will read from his collections of short poems as well as passages from his widely acclaimed novel in verse, The Golden Gate. After the reading, he will sign copies of The Golden Gate and several of his other works. (Admission to this event is free and open to the public.)

Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Seth is the author of several collections of poems, including The Humble Administrator’s Garden and All You Who Sleep Tonight. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993), won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). His best-selling novel, An Equal Music (1999), is the story of a violinist haunted by the memory of a former lover.

Seth is also the author of a travel book, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), an account of a journey through Tibet, China and Nepal that won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His other works include a volume of translations of verse from the T’ang Dynasty, Three Chinese Poets.

For more about Seth, go to http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth89.   

This event is sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Department of English, and College of Arts and Letters at CSULA.

The University is located at the Eastern Avenue exit, San Bernardino Freeway, at the interchange of the 10 and 710 Freeways. Public (permit dispensers) parking is available on the top level of Parking Structure C. For more on the poetry reading, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.

 Jean Burden Annual Poetry Series

This series, one of the longest running and most prestigious in the U.S., was established in 1986 by friends of the late Jean Burden to honor her achievements as a poet, essayist, editor, teacher and scholar. An Illinois native, University of Chicago alumna, and Altadena resident, Burden served as poetry editor of Yankee Magazine for 47 years, and published two collections of poetry, a volume of essays on poetry, and six books on animal welfare. Sustained by a generous bequest from Virginia Smith, the Jean Burden Series has featured guest readers Lucille Clifton, Wendy Cope, Victor Hernández Cruz, Rita Dove, Anthony Hecht, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Andrew Motion, Harryette Mullen, Howard Nemerov, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.

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