![\"Anne](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Anne_Carson_poet_at_the_2024_National_Book_Awards_finalist_reading-2560-768x439.jpg\")
\nAnne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards finalist reading at NYU Skirball in New York City. Jay Dixit via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n
Carson served as the 2000\u201301 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry, an appointment that brings distinguished poets to Berkeley to teach and share their work with students.<\/p>\n
\nAnne Carson at the 2024 National Book Awards finalist reading at NYU Skirball in New York City. Jay Dixit via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, she has a place in UC Berkeley\u2019s literary history, too: She served as the English department\u2019s Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry<\/a> during the 2000-01 academic year.<\/p>\n At Berkeley, Carson joined a distinguished roster of Holloway lecturers, including Louise Gl\u00fcck, 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.<\/p>\n Celeste Langan<\/a>, an associate professor in Berkeley\u2019s Department of English, attended Carson\u2019s 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 \u201ctangos.\u201d The dance serves as a metaphor for marriage: Both, in the book\u2019s framing, must be danced to the end. It was Langan\u2019s first encounter with \u201ctango\u201d as a literary form.<\/p>\n Today Langan, whose scholarship includes disability and poetry, teaches several of Carson\u2019s more recent poems every chance she gets. Among them is \u201cGloves On!,\u201d which explores how Carson\u2019s handwriting has been altered by involuntary tremors caused by Parkinson\u2019s disease. Such poems, Langan says, \u201cchallenge the fantasy of one\u2019s very own voice,\u201d inviting students to question the relationship between bodily control and identity.<\/p>\n Poet Geoffrey O\u2019Brien<\/a>, a Berkeley professor of English and faculty lead for the Holloway lectureship, held the appointment himself in 2003-04. He says the program \u201callows for a thicker sense of what is on offer in the contemporary field.\u201d<\/p>\n Visiting poets like Carson, he says, are drawn to Berkeley by its long engagement with poetry and the \u201clarger past and present ecology of the Bay Area.\u201d<\/p>\n The lectureship grew out of a bequest from Berkeley alumna and poet Roberta C. Holloway, who earned both her bachelor\u2019s 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 \u2014 establishing a connection between visiting writers and Berkeley students that has endured for more than four decades.<\/p>\n Her bequest also supports the English department\u2019s 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\u2019s public literary life.<\/p>\n Beyond Wheeler Hall, Berkeley\u2019s poetry community gathers for Lunch Poems<\/a>, a free public reading series in Doe Library\u2019s Morrison Library. Founded in 1995 with the help of English Professor Robert Hass<\/a>, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008<\/a>, the monthly series brings poets and audiences together for noontime readings, extending the campus\u2019s literary life to the wider community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carson served as the 2000\u201301 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry, an appointment that brings distinguished poets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[139452,143,145,144,139450,139451],"class_list":["post-490100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-faculty-excellence","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-research-berkeley","tag-uc-berkeley-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}