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The Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture honor the life and work of former University of Chicago student, Pearl Andelson Sherry.

Pearl Andelson Sherry was born on the west side of Chicago in 1899. Despite objections from her father, she attended the University for one year, probably in 1916-1917. During that time, Pearl Sherry met a group of writers and poets involved in the Poetry Club, including Ivor Winters, Janet Lewis, and John Toigo; she remained friends with the members of the Poetry Club for the rest of her life. This literary circle nurtured Pearl Sherry’s own aspirations as a writer, and she began her writing career working at Poetry magazine with Harriet Monroe. Her first book of poetry, "Fringe," was published in 1923, and her poetry, fiction and reviews appeared in many periodicals, including Dial, Poetry, New Republic, Chelsea, and the Southern Review. Pearl Sherry continued to write and publish poetry until shortly before she died in 1996.

Established in 1997 through a gift from the Sherry Family, the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Fund annually brings a major contemporary poet to the University of Chicago to work with students and to present the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture.

2010 Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poet: MARK STRAND

 

Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook prize and the Bergin prize. After receiving his B.F.A. degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his M.A. degree from the University of Iowa. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968). He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005), The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976). His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

 

2009 Poet: Carl Phillips

Reading from his work. Watch the video.
Lecture: Little Gods of Making. Watch the video.

Carl Phillips is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (FSG, 2007), and Speak Low (FSG, 2009). He is also the author of Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004) and the translator of Sophocles's Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). His awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Lambda Book Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was elected a Chancellor in 2006. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Past Sherry Poets

WINTER 2009 Carl Phillips
AUTUMN 2007 Susan Howe
AUTUMN 2006 Michael Palmer
AUTUMN 2005 Jim Powell
AUTUMN 2004 Allen Grossman
SPRING 2004 Mark Doty
SPRING 2003 Campbell McGrath
SPRING 2003 Kenneth Field
SPRING 2001 Alane Rollings
SPRING 2000 Eleanor Wilner
SPRING 1999 David Wojahn
SPRING 1998 Anne Winters