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Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading

2013 Reading

Paul Muldoon presented the 16th Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading on Sunday, April 14 at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA Map & Parking Info). Baltimore's WYPR broadcast an engaging interview with Muldoon before the reading that you can listen to here!

To be added to the Ringel mailing list, email us, become a fan on Facebook, or send a note with your address directly to:

Johns Hopkins University - Center for Talented Youth (CTY)
The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund
McAuley Hall
5801 Smith Ave, Ste 400
Baltimore, MD 21209

2013 Poet -- Paul Muldoon

“Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down...Those who interrogate Muldoon’s poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does...authentically touched or delighted.” —The New York Times Book Review

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Between 1999 and 2004, he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. The End Of The Poem, a collection of the Oxford lectures was published in 2006. Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973); Mules (1977); Why Brownlee Left (1980); Quoof (1983); Meeting The British (1987); Madoc: A Mystery (1990); The Annals of Chile (1994); Hay (1998); Poems 1998-1998 (2001); Moy Sand and Gravel (2002); for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Horse Latitudes (2006); and Maggot (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1996. Other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. He is the current Poetry Editor of the New Yorker Magazine.

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About Series

The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund memorializes CTY alumnus Joshua Ringel and his mother, Barbara, supporting a free annual poetry reading in Baltimore for both lovers of poetry, and those who wish to learn to love it as Joshua did.

Josh's teacher, the renowned poet Kenneth Koch, gave the inaugural Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading in 1998.

Since then, many other distinguished poets, including Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, and Kevin Young, have lent their voices to this remarkable series. A gift by Josh's father, Mel Ringel, in 2004 created an endowment at Johns Hopkins, with a goal of sustaining the Reading in perpetuity.

About Josh

On October 27, 1996, Joshua Ringel died in a motorcycle accident in the beautiful countryside near Madrid. In 1998, Barbara, Mel, and Susannah Ringel established the Joshua Ringel Memorial Readings. On December 3, 2002, at age 66, Barbara died of thyroid cancer. The poetry readings were her dream. Now they are a memorial to her as well as Josh.

Josh was born in Baltimore on December 20, 1968. His early zest for learning language, literature, history, chess, and wrestling, was nurtured during his twelve years at Gilman School. While in middle school, Josh was also a student at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins.

Except for a semester studying Spanish in Seville, and summers in Baltimore, he lived in Manhattan for most of 1987-1994. He majored in Spanish Language and Literature at Columbia and was fluent in Spanish when he earned his BA in 1992. Josh was proud that Kenneth Koch accepted him as a student of poetry writing. He also studied tap dancing, sang in a gospel singing group and was a DJ of "Blues and Bach" at Columbia's WKCR. Until 1994 he lived in and enjoyed New York by working as a desk attendant at Barnard College. The workers of Local 2110 elected him Shop Steward.

In 1994, Josh moved to Alcobendas, Spain, to teach English to children at the Lambda School. There, too, he did more--dancing at the best clubs in Madrid, running the 1995 Madrid Marathon and motorcycling. Josh's exuberance infected his students. They paid him their ultimate compliment--a trophy labeled, "Al Profe Mas Guay" (Cool).

Series Poets

Support The Fund

Contributions are welcome to support the Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund. To donate online, enter your gift in the Other Amount box and select the Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund in the Gift Designation box.

For more information on how you can help or be added to the Ringel mailing list, you can email us or call (410) 735-6009.

Contributions and mailing list additions may also be sent directly to:

Johns Hopkins University - Center for Talented Youth (CTY)
The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund
McAuley Hall
5801 Smith Ave, Ste 400
Baltimore, MD 21209

 
 

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