Bilingual Poetry Evening with John Balaban

Thu 26 Sep 2013, 9 – 10 pm
Tadioto

From the organizer:

Come to the bilingual poetry evening with John Balaban.

John Balaban is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award.

During the Viet Nam War, Balaban was a conscientious objector and went to Viet Nam with the International Volunteer Services where he taught at a university until it was bombed in the Tet Offensive (1968). He was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and evacuated; after his recovery, he worked to save burned and injured children from the war. He left Vietnam in 1969, but returned in 1971 to work on Ca Dao Viet Nam, a collection of folkloric poems. In 2000, he released Spring Essence, a collection of poems by Hồ Xuân Hương, an 18th-century poet and the preeminent woman poet of Vietnam. The book included English translations and versions in both the current Vietnamese alphabet and the historical Chữ Nôm writing system. He is co-editor, with Nguyen Qui Duc, of Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Balaban has written other works that draw on his experiences in Viet Nam including the extraordinary memoir, Remembering Heaven’s Face. His anthology Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award. He is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English in the creative writing program of North Carolina State University.