Posted January 19, 2000

Berkeley's own Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz gives a rare public reading Thursday, Feb. 3 as part of the campus's Lunch Poems Series. He will be introduced by his translator, former Poet Laureate Robert Hass.

The reading, which is free and open to the public, begins at 12:10 p.m. in Doe Library's Morrison Room.

Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, was born in Lithuania and raised in Poland. Much of his early work reflects on the suffering his native country endured during World War II and subsequent Soviet take-over.

Because his writing was critical of Poland's communist regime, he was forced to defect in 1951. He exiled to France and eventually landed in Berkeley, where, in 1960, he took a teaching position in Slavic Languages and Literature. He retired in 1980.

Now 88 years old, Milosz is still writing critically acclaimed poetry. Of his most recent work, "Road-Side Dog," the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review says it contains "poems as haunting as he has ever written...a valorous and beautiful work."

Lunch Poems, a monthly noon-time poetry reading series, brings Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa to campus Thursday, March 2.

For information, visit the Lunch Poems Web site at www.lib.berkeley.edu/MORR/ poetry.html or call 642-0137.

January 19 - 25, 2000 (Volume 28, Number 18)
Copyright 2000, The Regents of the University of California.
Produced and maintained by the Office of Public Affairs at UC Berkeley.
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