Harold Bloom, renowned literary critic and best-selling author, will give the Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Poetry Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, in 111 Mergenthaler Hall on the Homewood campus.

Harold Bloom

Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University. He has written more than 20 books, including the recent Genius and the best-selling The Western Canon, The Book of J and Shakespeare: Invention of the Human. Bloom is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. In 1999, he received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2001, he was awarded the International Prize of Catalonia.

Bloom's latest book, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, was released on March 10 by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam. While Shakespeare: Invention of the Human examines every Shakespeare play, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited focuses on what Bloom calls the "infinite reverberations" of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable work.

The Turnbull Poetry Lecture, given through the generosity of a gift made in 1889 in memory of Percy Graeme Turnbull (1878-87), has brought to Homewood some of the most distinguished voices in American poetry and criticism, including Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Charles Eliot Norton, R.P. Blackmur, Northrop Frye and W.S. Merwin.

On Wednesday, the day before the lecture, Bloom will host a book-signing session from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Johns Hopkins University Bookcenter in the basement of Gilman Hall.

For more information, call the Writing Seminars at 410-516-6286.