Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck will read from her work and present awards to student poets during the University's 34th annual Wallace Stevens Program April 7-8.

Sponsored by the Department of English, with support from The Hartford and assistance from The Friends of Wallace Stevens, the April 7 program will be held at 8 p.m. in the Doris and Simon Konover Auditorium of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The program on April 8 will take place at 6 p.m. in the Tower Suite of The Hartford's corporate headquarters in Hartford. A reception and book-signing will follow the programs. The public is invited to attend the free events.

Gluck was born in New York City in 1943. She has published seven books of poems, including The Triumph of Achilles, Ararat and The Wild Iris, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Her most recent book is Meadowlands.

Gluck's book of essays, Proofs and Theories, won the P.E.N. Martha Albrand Award for non-fiction in 1995. Her other awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, the Melville Kane Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gluck has taught at Brandeis University, Harvard University, Williams College and the University of California. She has given special lectures at the University of Michigan, Skidmore College and Harvard University, and has judged many poetry competitions.

The poetry program began at UConn in 1964 with a gift from the Hartford Insurance Group, now The Hartford, to support cash awards and books of poetry as prizes to aspiring young poets and to bring a distinguished poet to the University. Over the years, the program has brought to Storrs and Hartford such poets as Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwin, June Jordan, Anne Sexton, Marianne Moore, James Merrill, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg and Carolyn Forche.

The program honors the memory of Wallace Stevens, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was an insurance executive at The Hartford for 38 years. Stevens died in 1955, three months after receiving the Pulitzer. In 1949, he won the Bollingen Prize, and he received two National Book Awards for volumes of poetry published in 1951 and 1955.