Who: Paul Muldoon, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets.

When: Wednesday, February 16, 2005, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Sorenson Center for the Arts Babson College, Wellesley, MA.

Tickets: Admission is free; the public is welcome.

A reception and book signing will follow the reading.

Paul Muldoon is the youngest member of a group of well-known Irish poets—including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley—which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, he studied at Queen’s University of Belfast and became a student of Heaney’s.

In 1971 at the age of nineteen, Muldoon completed his first collection of poems, Knowing My Place, and the publication two years later of New Weather helped establish his reputation as an innovative new voice in English-language poetry. Since then, he has published numerous collections of poetry, including Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. American poet and critic William Logan has described Muldoon as “our poetry’s Don Quixote.”

Since 1987 Muldoon has lived in the U.S., where he is Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Award, the 1997 Irish Times Award, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize.