Poet William Stafford Celebration

Thursday, January 10
5:30 p.m.
The Twig Book Shop
5005 Broadway

A Reading in Honor of William Stafford and His Necessary Voice:
To Toast His Birth and a New Year of Hope
Organized by Naomi Shihab Nye

Readings by a circle of citizens, including Rosemary Catacalos, Robert Bonazzi, Ignacio Magaloni, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others.

William Stafford was born in Hutchison, Kansas, the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. During the Depression, his family moved from town to town in an effort to find work for his father. Stafford helped contribute to the family income by delivering newspapers, working in the sugar beet fields, and working as an electrician's mate. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and worked in civilian public service camps. His first major work, Traveling Through the Dark, was published when Stafford was forty-eight. It won the National Book Award in 1963. He went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose. In 1970 he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position currently known as the Poet Laureate).

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