Image credit: Beowulf Sheehan
New York, NY (May 20, 2024) – Lucas Wittmann has been appointed Executive Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center. The announcement was made today by Seth Pinsky, Chief Executive Officer of The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), a world-class cultural and community center in New York City.
Wittmann brings to the Unterberg Poetry Center an extensive background in media, literary event programming, and publishing. He joins 92NY from TIME where he was the Editorial Director, overseeing the Ideas and Opinion sections. Before that, he worked at W. W. Norton & Company and at Regan Arts, and as literary editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, for which he received a National Magazine Award. Wittmann co-founded the nonprofit House of Speakeasy, which hosts literary cabarets at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and brings writers into New York City schools.
“Having worked in the world of literature and publishing for many years, I know how much the Poetry Center means to writers, publishers, and, most especially, to readers, and the impact it has had on those communities,” said Lucas Wittmann, Executive Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center. “Literature has been a passion of mine from a very young age when I would spend many happy hours reading all kinds of books. I am deeply honored to accept this role which plays a vital role in building community through literature on one of America’s greatest literary stages.”
“I am excited for the Poetry Center under Lucas’s leadership and look forward to the programming he will develop for this fall’s season and beyond,” said Seth Pinsky, Chief Executive Officer of the 92NY. “Lucas’s appointment honors the distinguished history of 92NY’s Poetry Center. With his background and personal passion for literature, we know that he will build on the Poetry Center’s proud legacy. We are thrilled to have him on board.”
Founded in 1939, the Unterberg Poetry Center has provided a showcase for established and emerging talent, a platform for literary retrospectives and a testing ground for works-in-progress. The Poetry Center has a long history of presenting interdisciplinary events, with a distinguished legacy of platforming verse drama, such as the 1949 Poets’ Theater presentation of Jean Genet’s The Servant Girls, the 1953 world-premiere reading of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, featuring Dylan Thomas, and the reading of poet Paul Schmidt’s translation of Euripides’ Medea in 2000.
The Poetry Center’s reading series is one of the oldest and most revered in the country and regularly attracts the most distinguished writers of our time. The Center has presented such major poets as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas. Poetry Center guests have also included Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Joseph Brodsky, Anthony Burgess, Umberto Eco, Ralph Ellison, John Fowles, Seamus Heaney, Eugéne Ionesco, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Sir Tom Stoppard, John Updike, Alice Munro, Tommy Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rumaan Alam and Tennessee Williams.
In addition to the reading series, the Poetry Center has outreach programs to make events accessible to New York City public high school students.
###
About The Unterberg Poetry Center
Thanks to a generous gift from the Greenwood Family, the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center is named in honor of Bella Unterberg, one of 92NY’s founders. Through a generous gift from the Estate of Amber Walker, two of the Center’s signature programs have been named in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker: the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literature Project and the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series.
The Unterberg Poetry Center receives major support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Jill and Michael J. Franco; Estate of James and Alice Greenwood; Estate of Joan L. Jacobson; The University of Illinois Library; and Eva Colin Usdan and John Usdan.
About 92NY
The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a world-class center for the arts and innovation, a convener of ideas, and an incubator for creativity. 92NY offers extensive classes, courses and events online including live concerts, talks and master classes; fitness classes for all ages; 250+ art classes, and parenting workshops for new moms and dads. The 92nd Street Y, New York is transforming the way people share ideas and translate them into action all over the world. All of 92NY’s programming is built on a foundation of Jewish values, including the capacity of civil dialogue to change minds; the potential of education and the arts to change lives; and a commitment to welcoming and serving people of all ages, races, religions, and ethnicities. For more information, visit www.92NY.org.