In the Spirit of Room 222
In the late 1950s, Robert Lowell led a workshop whose students included three younger writers: George Starbuck, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. This legendary group gathered in the same small, corner classroom where our creative writing workshops continue to meet. The Robert Lowell Memorial Lectures celebrate this legacy, and the thriving community of writers, teachers and students at Boston University, by bringing a distinguished poet to campus each semester to read alongside a recent graduate of the program.
Hosted by the Favorite Poem Project, the Robert Lowell Memorial Reading series is made possible due to the generous support of Fred Levin and his late wife Nancy Livingston (COM ’69). Thanks to Fred’s continuing support, the Lowell Memorial Reading Series takes place twice a year, as it has since 2004.
The Spring 2025 Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture
Featuring Maggie Dietz, Carl Phillips, and Erin Belieu
Wednesday, March 5th at 7:30PM in the Boston University Hillel House River Room (4th Floor)
Maggie Dietz’s third book of poems, If You Would Let Me, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2026. She is also the author of That Kind of Happy (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Perennial Fall (Chicago, 2006) and co-editor of three anthologies related to her longtime work on the Favorite Poem Project. Her awards include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, as well as fellowships from the NH State Council on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a residency at Jentel Arts in Wyoming. Poems from the new book appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Dietz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, for which he received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include the Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (2023). He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her recent book Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu’s poems have appeared in places such as New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and have been selected for multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Belieu is the recipient of the Barnes and Noble Writers For Writers Award, AWP’s George Garrett Prize, and in 2024 received the Mari Sandoz Award, given to Nebraska-born writers for their significant and enduring contributions to literature. Belieu teaches for the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.
