Local Connection, National Stage

Photo of Pulitzer Prize-winner Marianne Moore

The lie and work of Pulitzer Prize-inning poet Marianne Moore (pictured) is captured in a new biography by Linda Leavell, who wil discuss her latest work and three decades of research of Moore in a Nov. 14 lecture at Dickinson.

By Alejandro Heredia '16

Award-winning author Linda Leavell will discuss her latest work, Holding on Upside Down, a biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore, in a lecture at Dickinson on Thursday, Nov. 14, at 7 p.m. in the Stafford Lecture Room, Rector Science Complex, 301 West Louther Street. Following the lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of English and the independent Whistlestop Bookshop, owned by Jeff Wood '85, Leavell will sign copies of her book.

For more than three decades, Leavell has studied the life and work of the American modernist poet and her Moore biography recently garnered strong praise in The New Yorker and Slate online. "Linda Leavell is a major scholar. Her work on Moore over the past 30 years has illuminated the relation of poetry to the visual arts in the American 20th century," says Dickinson English professor and award-winning author Wendy Moffat. "Now, Leavell brings a decade of research, and unprecedented access to Moore's family papers, together in a fine and beautifully written biography. We'll be using her insights for decades to come." Moffat's 2010 biography of E.M. Forster, A Great Unrecorded History, was lauded by The New York Times as "one of the top 10 books of 2010" and received the Best First Biography Prize by the Biographers' Club in London.

Moore was a prestigious and witty poet who lived on North Hanover Street in Carlisle for many years, teaching from 1911 to 1915 at the Carlisle Indian School, where one of her students was the great athlete Jim Thorpe. In 1918, she moved with her mother to New York City, where she lived until her death in 1972. In addition to the Pulitzer, Moore won the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Robert Frost Medal. In 2002, a historical marker honoring Moore was installed at 343 North Hanover Street.

For more information, call 717-243-4744 or email Kelly Winters-Fazio at wintersk@dickinson.edu.

Published November 14, 2013