Award-Winning Poet to Address Bennington College’s MFA in Writing Program's January Class of 2007

Poet Vijay Seshadri will address graduates of Bennington College’s MFA in Writing’s January class of 2007, Saturday, January 13, 2007 during their winter commencement ceremony. Seshadri’s two collections of poems include the James Laughlin Award winner, The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004), as well as Wild Kingdom (1996), celebrated as one of the most exciting debuts in years.

Dubbed as “gracefully contemporary” by The New Yorker, The Long Meadow presents an array of inventive and emotionally powerful poems that capsulate the complexities of the human experience. Through disparate forms, from the long narrative and the brief rhyming lyric to the prose meditation, The Long Meadow looks through our troubled world with a poetic sensibility.

“Vijay Seshadri is a writer of subtle, elastic and unblinking intelligence. Thematically, Seshadri asks big questions and addresses big issues—time and consciousness, suffering and devotion—but for all their deep seriousness of purpose, his poems refuse to take themselves too seriously,” Campbell McGrath, head juror for James Laughlin Award, reflected.

Seshadri’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Anteaus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, as well as inclusions in many anthologies including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been awarded The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement.