RANDOLPH — Jonathan Blunk, a poet with New Jersey roots, has included County College of Morris (CCM) on his national book tour for “James Wright: A Life in Poetry.”
Blunk will read from his book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and talk about the meaning of poetry in the life of Wright. The reading takes place Tuesday, March 20, at 12:30 p.m., in the Sherman H. Masten Learning Resource Center, Room 121, on the CCM campus, 214 Center Grove Road, Randolph. The event is free and open to the public.
Blunk’s book on Wright has been hailed by the New York Times as an “engrossing biography” where “Wright comes through vividly on every page.”
An Ohio native, Wright’s first published book of verse was “The Green Wall,” which was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. In 1971, he was elected to the Academy of American Poets and the following year his “Collected Poems” received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
A poet, essayist, and radio producer, Blunk has written for The Nation, Poets & Writers, The Georgia Review and other publications. He also assisted with editing “A Wild Perfection,” the selected letters of James Wright.
Blunk was born in Denville and grew up in Basking Ridge and Martinsville. Now a Hudson Valley resident, he also lived in Somerville and Raritan in the 1980s while working as a researcher at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark and as a disc jockey at WFMU-FM in East Orange.
