Carson served as the 2000–01 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry, an appointment that brings distinguished poets to Berkeley to teach and share their work with students.
Anne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards finalist reading at NYU Skirball in New York City. Jay Dixit via Wikimedia Commons
Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist and translator, was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today (Thursday, Oct. 8). A genre-bending writer whose work blends poetry, translation and classical scholarship, Carson has been widely celebrated for remixing ancient Greek texts in ways that feel inventive and modern.
As it turns out, she has a place in UC Berkeley’s literary history, too: She served as the English department’s Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry during the 2000-01 academic year.
At Berkeley, Carson joined a distinguished roster of Holloway lecturers, including Louise Glück, Naomi Shihab Nye, Frank Bidart, Robert Hass, Paul Muldoon and Yusef Komunyakaa. The appointment brings a visiting poet to Berkeley for a semester to deliver a lecture and teach a poetry workshop, giving students the opportunity to learn directly from leading voices in contemporary poetry.
Celeste Langan, an associate professor in Berkeley’s Department of English, attended Carson’s Holloway lecture in 2001. Carson read from The Beauty of the Husband, her 2001 narrative poetry collection about a troubled marriage, told in 29 sections of narrative verse she calls “tangos.” The dance serves as a metaphor for marriage: Both, in the book’s framing, must be danced to the end. It was Langan’s first encounter with “tango” as a literary form.
Today Langan, whose scholarship includes disability and poetry, teaches several of Carson’s more recent poems every chance she gets. Among them is “Gloves On!,” which explores how Carson’s handwriting has been altered by involuntary tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease. Such poems, Langan says, “challenge the fantasy of one’s very own voice,” inviting students to question the relationship between bodily control and identity.
Poet Geoffrey O’Brien, a Berkeley professor of English and faculty lead for the Holloway lectureship, held the appointment himself in 2003-04. He says the program “allows for a thicker sense of what is on offer in the contemporary field.”
Visiting poets like Carson, he says, are drawn to Berkeley by its long engagement with poetry and the “larger past and present ecology of the Bay Area.”
The lectureship grew out of a bequest from Berkeley alumna and poet Roberta C. Holloway, who earned both her bachelor’s degree and doctorate in English on campus. Holloway had hoped to teach at her alma mater; although that opportunity never came, her bequest made it possible for other poets to do so — establishing a connection between visiting writers and Berkeley students that has endured for more than four decades.
Her bequest also supports the English department’s Holloway Poetry Series, which features Berkeley graduate student poets alongside prominent visiting poets. The readings give students an opportunity to share their own work as part of the campus’s public literary life.
Beyond Wheeler Hall, Berkeley’s poetry community gathers for Lunch Poems, a free public reading series in Doe Library’s Morrison Library. Founded in 1995 with the help of English Professor Robert Hass, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, the monthly series brings poets and audiences together for noontime readings, extending the campus’s literary life to the wider community.