Poet revisits Newcomb roots

Jennifer Grotz, though now a renowned poet, professor and translator, was once a Newcomb College undergraduate finding her way. She returns to campus as this year’s Florie Gale Arons Poet, a long-standing program organized by the Newcomb College Institute and generously supported by Arons’ daughters and friends in her memory.

“It's delightful to be returning to Tulane as a visiting poet, because Tulane is probably where I first really became a poet,” said Grotz. “I published my first poems in the Tulane Literary Review and took my first workshops with professor Peter Cooley many years ago.”

Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open. Also a translator of French and Polish, her most recent translation is Rochester Knockings, a novel by Tunisian-born writer Hubert Haddad. Her poems, reviews and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review and in four volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology.

“I look forward to meeting the new generation of students and the poets among them.”

Jennifer Grotz

She is director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in addition to teaching at the University of Rochester.

“Tulane University and New Orleans in general is such a literary place,” said Grotz. “I remember hearing writers as diverse as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Doty, Margaret Atwood, Linda Hogan, Louise Gluck and Lynn Emanuel—among many others—during my time there.”

While here, Grotz will give a public reading on Monday (Sept. 19) at 7 p.m. in the Woldenberg Art Center’s Freeman Auditorium. She will also visit classes and lead workshops for today’s undergraduates, who are finding their own way to the written word.

“I look forward to meeting the new generation of students and the poets among them.”