The National Portrait Gallery will host a poetry reading with three award-winning poets: Guggenheim Fellow and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award-winner John Koethe, Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa and Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon. This event, with book signing to follow, will take place Sunday, April 21, at 2 p.m. in the Portrait Gallery’s Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium.
This gathering will mark the end of the exhibition “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” closing April 28, and will be held in anticipation of the publication of Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present, to be released this fall (National Portrait Gallery; distributed by Smithsonian Books). The 136-page book contains 12 newly commissioned poems on the Civil War by major contemporary poets. Koethe, Komunyakaa and Muldoon have contributed original work to the publication; they are among the most important contemporary poets now writing in English. Following the event, the poets will sign their most recent books.
The reading and the poets will be introduced by Portrait Gallery historian and curator of “Poetic Likeness” David C. Ward. Ward is also co-editor of Lines in Long Array.
The National Portrait Gallery is part of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture at Eighth and F streets N.W., Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Information: (202) 633-1000. Website: npg.si.edu.