Lannan Readings & Conversations

Jim Harrison

with Ted Kooser
Wednesday January 18 2006

Jim Harrison (right) in conversation with Ted Kooser at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Wednesday, January 18, 2006. Photo: Don Usner

Ted Kooser. Photo by Don Usner Jim Harrison has published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems; After Ikkyu; The Theory and Practice of Rivers; Natural World: A Bestiary; Returning to Earth; and Locations. He has worked as a screenwriter, book reviewer, literary critic, food columnist, sportswriter, and conservationist. Other works include a collection of novellas, The Summer He Didn't Die, and Legends of the Fall, which was made into a celebrated film. Mr. Harrison has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was born in northern Michigan in 1937 and continued to reside there until recently. He and his wife now divide their time between Montana and Arizona.

Jim Harrison Bio and Cross Links


Ted Kooser. Photo by Don Usner Ted Kooser is currently serving a second term as the nation's Poet Laureate. His appointment came in the same week that he received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book, Delight and Shadows, full of literary portraits and landscapes of life on the Great Plains. During his first term as Poet Laureate, Kooser inaugurated the program "American Life in Poetry" which offers a free weekly column to local newspapers around the country featuring a brief poem by a living American and a sentence of two of introduction to the work. The author of ten collections of poetry, Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. In 2000, Kooser published Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison. His second collaboration with his friend is Braided Creek. He is a visiting professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Ted Kooser Bio and Cross Links