Exeter, NH (October 28, 2008)—On Wednesday, November 5, at 7:30 p.m., Phillips Exeter Academy’s Class of 1945 Library will present a reading by poet Major Jackson. He will be the first Lamont Poet in the Library’s Lamont Poetry Program for 2008–09. The reading will be held in the Assembly Hall, located on the second floor of the Academy Building on Front Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont, and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the author of two poetry collections: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002); and is a past winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson also served as a creative fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature–Poetry. The New Yorker magazine has described his work as “witty, musical, and intelligent; he is equally happy discussing the war on terror. . . or describing early crushes. (His) subjects include: Columbine, Tupac Shakur, and the conditions and future of the Black poet.” Jackson’s third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, and The New Yorker, among other journals and several anthologies. A member of the Dark Room Collective, he has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Currently, he serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.

Before joining the University of Vermont in 2002, Jackson was literary arts curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, an assistant professor of English at Xavier University, and a member of the Creative Writing Program at Queens College in Charlotte, NC. He earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Oregon.

The Library’s Lamont Poetry Series is supported by the Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont ’20. Two poets are invited each year to read their poetry and attend English classes. Each visiting poet is photographed and asked to present the library with a manuscript poem, which is framed and hung on the fourth floor of the library. The collection of framed manuscript poems includes the works of such noted poets as Jorge Luis Borges, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joseph Brodsky and Allen Ginsberg. The series continues to bring remarkable poets to Exeter and remains a testimony to Mr. Lamont, who died in 1995.

For more information, please call Academy Librarian Jacquelyn H. Thomas at (603) 777-3328 or visit the library’s events page. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, check online or call (603) 777-4330. A complete list of upcoming events is available on the Phillips Exeter Academy public events webpage, or at (603) 777-4309.