Booking and details
Dates & TicketsDates Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre, Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht, is awarded annually for a poetry collection by a poet who has published no more than one previous book of verse. This season, the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series and co-sponsor The Waywiser Press celebrate Julia Thacker, the 19th winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize with this year’s prize judge, acclaimed Irish poet, critic, playwright, and translator Paul Muldoon, who will read with Thacker. Muldoon is the author of fifteen full-length collections of poetry, and has published smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, and radio and television drama.
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About Waywiser Press
The Waywiser Press is a small independent company, with its main office in the UK, and a subsidiary in the USA. It was founded in late 2001, and started publishing in 2002. Waywiser is a literary press, first and foremost, with a special interest in modern poetry and fiction. Learn more
About the judge
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist and translator.
After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast, he published his first book, New Weather (Faber) in 1973, at the age of 21. From 1973 he worked as a producer for the BBC in Belfast until, in the mid-1980’s, he gave up his job to become a freelance writer and moved to the United States with his second wife, the American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. He now lives in New York City and Sharon Springs, New York. He is the father of two children.
Muldoon is the author of fifteen full-length collections of poetry, including Joy in Service on Rue Tagore (2024), Howdie-Skelp (2021), Frolic and Detour (2019), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Maggot (2010), Horse Latitudes (2006), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Hay (1998), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Meeting the British (1987), Quoof (1983), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Mules (1977) and New Weather (1973). He has also published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.
Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and as poetry editor of The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He has taught at Princeton University since 1987 and currently occupies the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. He was the Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. In addition to being much in demand as a reader and lecturer, he occasionally appears with a spoken word music group, Rogue Oliphant.
Paul Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Spirit of Ireland Award from the Irish Arts Center (NYC), the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from ten universities.
About the poet
Julia Thacker
The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Additionally, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bunting Institute (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), the Corporation of Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review and The New Republic. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as Poet-in-Residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She lives outside of Boston.