Internationally Acclaimed Poet JAMES RAGAN Reads at Norman Public Library

Norman Public Library
225 N. Webster Ave.
Norman, OK 73069

Thursday, May 14, 2009
7:00pm - 8:30pm

JAMES RAGAN has read his work for six heads of state including Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel and for audiences at Carnegie Hall and the United Nations. In 1985 he was one of three Americans (with Bob Dylan and Robert Bly) invited to perform at the International Poetry Festival in Moscow. His books of poetry include In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions, Selected Poems, and Shouldering the World. His awards include three Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, an NEA, and eight Pushcart Prize nominations, among others. His plays The Landlord and Commedia have been produced internationally. He has worked as a screenwriter and in production on such films as The Voyager, Exile (PBS), How the West Was Won, The Border, and the Academy Award winning The Deer Hunter.

Praise for James Ragan's Poetry

"Ragan's poems are satisfying and distinctive, full of arresting collocations and striking phrases."
Richard Wilbur - former U.S. Poet Laureate and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner

"James Ragan dominates the art of image, the art of poetic line, and the art of poetic narration with insight that marks major poets."
Miroslav Holub - Czech poet and Nobel Prize nominee

"James Ragan's fine-grained and witty poems move us through a remarkable range of history and geography, thematic variety and tonal dexterity."
C. K. Williams - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

"In Jim Ragan's poetry, there is lyrical wisdom. It is this juxtaposition that makes his work so exhilarating."
Studs Terkel - Pulitzer Prize-winning author

"James Ragan is a snake charmer whose words work real magic."
Henry Taylor - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

"James Ragan continues his song through the centuries in language that echoes Rilke."
Publisher's Weekly

http://www.pioneer.li...