A Celebration of Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot’s life has been a long and generous one. Born in 1921, Ponsot is in the midst of her tenth decade, and, as her accomplishments will attest, she hasn’t wasted any of her time. She has translated some thirty-seven books from French into English, written numerous radio and television scripts, co-authored two books on the pedagogy of writing, and published 6 volumes of poems. The recent release of her “Collected Poems” represent a lifetime of achievement for this New York City poet, who was also a longtime teacher of young poets, is the mother of seven children, and is a lifetime Roman Catholic. For seven decades Ponsot has written poems characterized by linguistic richness and formal elegance, poems that have engaged literary tradition and offered readers the music of the English language, and poems that, taken together, constitute a voice that is unmistakable and original.

The recipient of the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Lilly Prize, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and Fordham University are proud to present Marie Ponsot with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Please join us for a celebration of Ponsot’s work, one of the premiere American Catholic poets of the past century.