On Monday, December 2, award-winning poets Joan Larkin and Tony Towle will give the Fall 2013 reading in the Poets@Pace series.  The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m. in the Bianco Room, Level B, One Pace Plaza. It will include a Q&A, a book signing, and refreshments. Poets@Pace, which brings important poets to Pace’s New York City Campus each semester, is organized by Pace Poet-in-Residence Charles North and sponsored by the Office of the Provost.

Joan Larkin is the Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College and the author of six books of poems, most recently My Body: New and Selected Poems, which received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. Other honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lambda Award for poetry, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Los Angeles Times characterized her voice as “unsentimental, ruthless, and cleared-eyed. . . This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.” Larkin co-edited the groundbreaking anthologies Amazon Poetry, Lesbian Poetry, and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, and has published plays and prose in addition to poetry.

Tony Towle’s first major poetry collection, North (1970), won the Frank O’Hara Award for experimental poetry, and he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Poets Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Poet Kenneth Koch has written: “The deep surprising lyricism of the early poems and the incisive witty discourse of the darker late ones are both part of a poetry at the same time direct and highly artistic. Tony Towle’s is one of the clear, authentic voices of American poetry.”  Of Towle’s 2001 New and Selected Poems, former Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote that the book “belongs in every library, possibly on its very own shelf.” Towle has collaborated with well-known artists and poets and has taught poetry writing at The Poetry Project.

For more information about Poets@Pace, please contact Charles North at cnorth@pace.edu.

If you don’t know her from Steel Magnolias, maybe her infamous “don’t sh*t where you eat” Moonstruck quote is what you remember her by. In any case, Performing Arts at Pace presents The Masters Series: An Evening with Olympia Dukakis on Monday, November 25.

Oscar-winning actress, producer, author, director, and social activist Olympia Dukakis is joining Pace University Performing Arts students for a conversation about her career on stage and screen. Olympia Dukakis has appeared in more than 40 films, 100 plays, and 26 television movies, and has played parts ranging from her Oscar-winning role in 1987 as Cher's mother in Moonstruck, which made her famous, to the transsexual landlady in television's Tales of the City and More Tales of the City. She has also directed, taught acting, helped found five theaters, including the Whole Theater, and won numerous awards. The event, which will be held on Monday, November 25, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Schimmel Theatre, will be moderated by Cosmin Chivu, the Director of the BA International Performance Ensemble/ Pace Performing Arts. The event is free for all Pace students, faculty, and staff.

Additional information about Dukakis: Broadway credits include Rose (Drama Desk Award Nominee), Social Security, Who's Who in Hell. London: Rose (Royal National Theatre), Credible Witness (Royal Court). Off-Broadway: The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, The Tempest, Singing Forest, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Curse of the Starving Class, Titus Andronicus, A Man’s a Man (Obie Award), Electra and Peer Gynt at the Public Theatre.

She won an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck, a role that also earned her a Golden Globe Award, American Comedy Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has appeared in more than 60 feature and short films, including Cloudburst (most recent), Mr. Holland’s Opus, Steel Magnolias, Dad, Look Who’s Talking I, II & III, Mighty Aphrodite, Jeffrey, Away From Her, among many others. 

Television credits include: Bored to Death (most recent), Last of the Blond Bombshells (Judi Dench), Sinatra (Golden Globe nominee), Joan of Arc (Emmy nominee), Tales of the City, More Tales of the City (Emmy nominee), and Further Tales of the City, among more than 40 others. She has performed in over 130 productions Off-Broadway and regionally at theatres including A.C.T., Shakespeare in the Park, Shakespeare & Co., and the Williamstown Summer Theatre Festival, where she also served as Associate Director. She will be seen at Shakespeare & Co. this summer in the title role of Mother Courage and Her Children. Founding member and Producing Artistic Director of the Whole Theatre in Montclair, NJ for 19 years; also a founding member of the Actor’s Company and the Charles Playhouse, both in Boston. She taught acting at NYU for 14 years and teaches master classes for colleges and universities across the country. She has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Greek America Foundation and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor and received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year.