Durham, NC - Robert Pinsky - an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator - served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. During that time, he became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.

Pinsky will hold an informal discussion on poetry at Duke at noon, Tuesday, Oct. 30, at the Center for Documentary Studies. Pinksy will talk about the connections between the poetic impulse and documentary expression, as well as his own experiences with capturing detail, preserving moments, and living in a visual, felt environment. The conversation will be moderated by Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies. About Pinsky's work, the poet Louise Gluck has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."

In addition, Pinsky will give a public reading at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30, at the Doris Duke Center in Duke Gardens. He will be introduced by Duke President Richard H. Brodhead. Pinsky's visit is part of the Blackburn Visiting Writer program.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.