Award-winning poet Peter Kane Dufault will launch this year’s series of readings by contemporary writers sponsored by MHC’s English department on Wednesday, September 19, in the library’s Stimson Room, at 4 pm. Tea and refreshments will be served at the event.

"Peter Kane Dufault is an original, even a maverick, but the closest comparison I can make is to Emily Dickinson," says poet Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. "In fact, he has joked to me that he’s pretty much the only one who ever understood her. In both of them I admire a grappling with the largest subjects—infinity, immortality—often by means of attention to the smallest and humblest things."

Dufault graduated from Harvard University in 1947 after serving as a bomber pilot during World War II. Since then, he has been variously employed as a tree surgeon, journalist, teacher, house painter, and pollster. In 1968, he was a candidate for United States Congress, running on the Liberal party’s anti-Vietnam War platform. He is also a fiddler, banjo player, and dance-caller. Dufault’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Encounter, and London Magazine, among other publications. Four of his poems are included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996). He has written three books, New Things Come Into This World (Lindisfarne Press, 1993), On Balance (1954), and Looking in All Directions: Selected Poems (Worple Press, 2000), which was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by Spectator Magazine. His collected poems, The Ponderable World, covering more than five decades, is now being assembled. Dufault has served as a visiting poet at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. He lives and writes in a cabin he built in Hillsdale, New York.