Hacker's talk is being presented in conjunction with the museum's exhibition Inside Out Loud: Women's Health in Contemporary Art, on display through April 24.

Marilyn Hacker

The author of 11 books of poetry and essays, Hacker is a cancer survivor and a prominent lesbian activist as well as an influential literary editor and a gifted translator. Much of her work details her own struggles with breast cancer and the loss of friends to AIDS.

Hacker has received many of poetry's highest honors, including a National Book Award for her first collection, Presentation Piece (1974); the Lambda Literary Award and the Nation's Lenore Marshall Prize for Winter Numbers (1994); and the 1996 Poet's Prize for Selected Poems 1965-1990.

Other books include Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), Squares and Courtyards (2000) and Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (2003).

Hacker's work has appeared in numerous anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry as well as in collections focusing on AIDS and women's illnesses. As editor of The Kenyon Review from 1990-94, she encouraged a number of emerging women, minority and gay and lesbian writers.

She divides her time between Paris and New York, where she teaches at City College and The City University of New York.

Inside Out Loud is the first major survey of contemporary American art to explore critical issues relating to women's health. The 51 works of art from across the country represent such topics as breast cancer, AIDS, reproductive rights and technology, beauty and aging, paralleling the rise in awareness of women's health as a distinct category in the medical profession and in the community at large.

In conjunction with the exhibition, more than 30 campus and community partners have joined with the Kemper Art Museum to present close to 70 events relating to women's health. For a complete schedule, contact Stephanie Parrish at 935-7918 or stephanie_parrish@wustl.edu.

Hacker's talk is free and open to the public and is sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences.

For more information, call 935-5576.