Colorado State University Welcomes Slovenian Poet and Diplomat March 19-20

Colorado State University will host a reading by Slovenian poet and diplomat Tomaz Salamun at 7:30 p.m. March 19 in the North Ballroom of the Lory Student Center on campus. Salamun will lead an additional discussion about politics and poetry at 4 p.m. March 20 in the Cherokee Park Room of the Lory Student Center. Both events are free and open to the public.

Salamun is regarded as one of the leading poets in Central Europe and has been widely acclaimed around the world. He has published 31 books of poetry in his native language and eight books in English translation. His book of poems, "The Four Questions of Melancholy," was nominated for the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and "The Shepherd, The Hunter" won the Columbia University Translation Prize. His honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, the Jenko Prize, the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Salamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and has a degree in art history from the University of Ljubljana. He worked as a conceptual artist before devoting himself to poetry. His work was included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970 and is part of a permanent collection at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was the assistant curator at the Moderna Galerija from 1968-1969 and is married to painter Metka Krasovec.

Salamun has taught at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Alabama, the University of Tennessee and Vermont College. He also received a Fulbright Grant to study at Columbia University.

Salamun worked as a cultural attache at the Slovenian Embassy in New York from 1996-1999, and his work has appeared in journals internationally. He speaks French, English, Italian, Croatian, Serbian and Spanish. Salamun’s writings have been translated into 13 languages, and he has given readings in 22 countries.

In his introduction to "The Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun," American poet Robert Hass wrote "Salamun’s tradition has been the disruptive, visionary side of European experimental art, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, the German expressionists, the French surrealists, the Russian futurists, the tradition in which poetry is an instrument for glimpsing a supreme reality, and for which all art is, finally, the scattered bits and pieces of that larger vision. This accounts for Salamun’s eclecticism, for the sense of improvisation in his poems, the surrealist lists…the disjunctions and sense of play."

The event is part of the Colorado State University Creative Writing Program’s Reading Series. Sponsors include the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Fund, Fort Fund, the Organization of Graduate Student Writers through the Associated Students of Colorado State University, the Lory Student Center Diversity Fund, Arts Alive, the College of Liberal Arts, the Colorado State University English Department, the Colorado State University Political Science Department, the Colorado State University History Department, the Colorado State University Foreign Language Department, the Colorado State University Literature Department, Hillel and the Center for Applied Studies in American Ethnicity.

For more information on these events, call (970) 530-0240.