March 26, 1999		Anne Carson, Canadian Poet and Classicist, to Read and Lecture at Oberlin College Media Contact: Marci Janas
	POETRY READING Wednesday, March 31 4:45 p.m. King Building Room 106 (corner of N. Professor and W. College streets)   JESSE MACK LECTURE Thursday, April 1 4:30 p.m. King Building Room 106   Free public events   For more information, please call the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program at (440) 775-6567		OBERLIN, OH--Anne Carson "is an original and startling poet," says Oberlin College Associate Professor of Creative Writing Pamela Alexander. Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, says: "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting person writing in English today. She is that rare talent . . . brilliant, passionate and deeply moving." The Canadian poet and scholar--Carson is professor of classics at McGill University--will read from her poems on March 31. The following day, at 4:30 p.m., she will deliver the annual Jesse Mack Lecture in the Humanities. The title of her talk is: "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porett and Simone Weil Tell God." Carson's epic poem, Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), received a National Book Critics Circle nomination and inspired a recent feature in the Canadian edition of TIME Magazine. Her other books of poetry include Plainwater (Knopf, 1995) and Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995). She is the 1996 winner of the Lannan Award for Poetry, the 1997 Pushcart Prize and a 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship. Autobiography of Red recasts the red-winged monster Geryon (from the 7th-century B.C. poet Stesichoros's fragmented myth) into a present-day story about a boy's passage into manhood. Susan Sontag calls the book "a spellbinding achievement." Carson is also a noted scholar. Her study of desire and frustration in Greek and Latin literature, Eros the Bittersweet, is "brilliant," says Oberlin Professor of Classics Thomas Van Nortwick. A book on the Greek poet Simonides is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Carson, who lives in Montreal, received her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto. Carson's reading is sponsored by Oberlin's Creative Writing Program, the English Department and the Classics Department.