Welcome Poetry Month with Celebrated Poet Heather McHugh.

"Astute," "noteworthy," and "courageous" are what top critics call the poetry of Heather McHugh, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other honors. Exuding a love of language, wit, and observation, McHugh creates poems that are profoundly intelligent. Through the use of puns, rhymes, and syntactical twists, her work is an ongoing inquiry into the ways language can aid and impede participation in life.

"My whole work is to catch the word by surprise, sneaking up on language, sneaking up on the world as it lurks in words," McHugh said. "I love the recesses of reason. That's a great place to set my mind at rest."

McHugh's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, several Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She has published seven books of poetry, several books of translations, and was guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2007. McHugh has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Alabama, the University of Cincinnati, Warren Wilson College, and elsewhere. Currently McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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