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California Academy of
Science Series

 Herbst Theatre

Tickets:
City Box Office www.cityboxoffice.com
415.392.4400

Books:
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Mary Oliver

In conversation

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 |  Herbst Theatre, 8pm

American poet Mary Oliver has conjured a rich and vibrant landscape in her work of the past five decades. Her twenty-seven volumes of work, including essays along with her prolific poetry, have won Mary Oliver many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive and a National Book Award for New and Selected Poems in 1992. In her widely appreciated poetry, Oliver explores, with characteristic reverence, the essential human spirit through keen insight into the natural world. In her 2008 collection, Red Bird, Oliver delivers elegant, spare poems that approach such subjects as boundary lines, a black swallowtail caterpillar and numerous feathered friends. Mary Oliver was born in Cleveland, Ohio and much of her poetry returns to her childhood haunts as well as the forests, streams and rivers of New England, where she has spent much of her adult life. During her early years of writing, Oliver was strongly influenced by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and spent several years living in the poet's country house in upstate New York. There she helped Millay's sister catalogue the poet's papers. Mary Oliver has previously taught at Case Western Reserve University, Sweet Briar College in Virginia and Bennington College in Vermont.

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