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News and Comments Bart Eeckhout, Glen MacLeod, and Natalie Russell Click for larger view View full resolution Left: Cultural medallion at 441 West 21st Street, Manhattan. Right: Poet Susan Howe and the president and vice president of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb and Glen MacLeod, at the ceremony to unveil the medallion. Photographs courtesy of Harold Steever. On July 11, 2018, a small ceremony was organized on the doorsteps of 441 West 21st Street in Manhattan to unveil a cultural medallion dedicated to the memory of Stevens. The medallion was an initiative of the Wallace Stevens Society and is supported by the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center, which seeks to mark sites where notable individuals in New York City lived, worked, and created. It reads as follows: Wallace Stevens October 2, 1879–August 2, 1955 441 West 21 Street, Manhattan Born in Reading, PA, poet Wallace Stevens attended Harvard University and graduated from New York Law School. He lived here, with his wife Elsie, between 1909 and 1916; during those years, he wrote "Sunday Morning" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," both published in Harmonium (1923). While pursuing poetry, Stevens began his career as an insurance lawyer; by 1914, he was vice president of Equity Surety Co.'s New York office, and in 1916, left New York to live in Hartford, CT, where he would become vice president of The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in 1934. Stevens was an extremely inventive writer who can be gaudy or elegant, humorous or meditative, ironic or philosophical by turns. He is now acknowledged as one of the great American modernist poets of the twentieth [End Page 290] century. His Collected Poems (1954) won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. During the sidewalk ceremony, the audience was addressed by the president and vice president of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb and Glen MacLeod, as well as the poets Susan Howe and Deborah Garrison. Howe, who also read three stanzas from "Sunday Morning," was moved by the occasion and testified, "I turn to Stevens these days almost as a form of prayer." A video recording of the ceremony will be made available through the HLPC website. ________ The sixth John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Gül Bilge Han for her contribution entitled "The Poetics of Relational Place-Making and Autonomy in Stevens" (Fall 2016). The award was judged by a committee of one former and two current members of the Editorial Board (George S. Lensing, Natalie Gerber, and Juliette Utard). It was officially presented at the 2018 MLA Convention in New York City. Please join us in congratulating the author. ________ The 2017 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, a $100,000 lifetime achievement award "for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry," went to Jorie Graham. ________ According to Joshua Barone reporting for The New York Times, Matthew Aucoin's opera Crossing, which tells the story of Walt Whitman's time as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 2017, resorted to two of Stevens's sentences about Whitman for the final chorus: "Nothing is final. . . . No man shall see the end" (CPP 121). [End Page 291] ________ The 55th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the University of Connecticut featured Joy Harjo, the author of eight books of poetry and a renowned musician. She read from her own poems on two successive days: on March 28, 2018, at UConn Storrs, and on March 29 at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. This annual event is sponsored by the Hartford Financial Services Group to honor Stevens as a former company executive. ________ The website of the Fulbright Program in Russia reports that the Philological Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University hosted a presentation on December 8, 2017, of a Russian translation of Harmonium, which appeared with the publisher Nauka in Moscow as part of a Literary Monuments series in 2017. The presentation included readings of Stevens's poetry in Russian by the...