One of the bittersweet moments for any Semester at Sea parent is saying goodbye to their son or daughter on embarkation day. A letter home, whether by post or email, is the perfect solace for a parent missing their child. For all the words that haven’t been said yet, Poet Laureate Paul Muldoon, Professor at Princeton University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and currently teaching English aboard the Summer 2013 voyage wrote “A Letter Home” ensuring parents their son or daughter is sailing on the voyage of a lifetime.
About Paul Muldoon
Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor; Awardee, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2003) – Princeton University (Discipline: English Writing)
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast. 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 at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. In 2007 he was appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker. 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 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006) and Maggot (2010). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was elected a Member of the American Academy in Arts and Letters in 2008. Among his recent awards are the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2003 International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize given ‘for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European cultural heritage.’
