Poetry Off the Shelf

Thursday, October 28, 6:00 PM

Poetry Off the Shelf:
John Balaban & Le Pham Le
Ruggles Hall
The Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street
Free admission


John Balaban is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, been selected for the National Poetry Series, and earned two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Balaban is a translator of Vietnamese poetry and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association, as well as a poet-in-residence and professor of English in the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Born in Vietnam, Le Pham Le attended the University of Pedagogy in Saigon, where she earned a BA in Vietnamese language and literature. After teaching high school for five years, she left her country with her family during the fall of South Vietnam. Her first publication is a bilingual collection of Vietnamese poems entitled Gio Thoi Phuong Nao/From Where the Wind Blows (Vietnamese International Poetry, 2003).