WHAT: Distinguished poet, playwright, Nobel Laureate and visual artist Derek Walcott will read and discuss selections of his work during a free, public presentation.

WHEN: Thursday, April 19, at 7 p.m.

WHERE: Room 208 of the UNLV Student Union

DETAILS: Part of the Black Mountain Institute's (BMI) Forum on Contemporary Cultures, the reading will conclude with a discussion between Walcott and BMI Senior Fellow and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who will engage Walcott in a dialogue about his work. Walcott is spending the month of April 2007 at UNLV as the Ghanem chair in creative writing, a post recently vacated by Soyinka, and is teaching a graduate poetry seminar through the department of English.

Founded in 2006, the Black Mountain Institute (BMI) is an international center for global discourse on today's most pressing issues. Named after the Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Las Vegas's own Black Mountain, the institute provides an environment where thinkers and writers from all segments of global society can fight against entrenched perspectives, whatever their political or cultural source.

For more information, please contact the Black Mountain Institute at 702-895-5542 or via e-mail at: queries@blackmountaininstitute.org.

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND:

Derek Walcott was born in Saint Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930 and began writing poetry at the age of 18. He graduated from the University of the West Indies, and, in 1957, was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop, and his plays have been produced throughout the United States. He founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre shortly after he accepted a professorship at Boston University, which presents original works by local, national, and international playwrights. He has also organized an exchange program between his Boston Playwrights' Theatre and the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.

His play "Dream on Monkey Mountain" won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He also received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Walcott teaches creative writing at Boston University every fall and lives the rest of the year in St. Lucia.

Founded in 2006, the Black Mountain Institute (BMI) is an international center for global discourse on today's most pressing issues. Named after the Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Las Vegas's own Black Mountain, the institute provides an environment where thinkers and writers from all segments of global society can fight against entrenched perspectives, whatever their political or cultural source.