Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate and University of Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty member, will return to the UI as an Ida Beam Visiting Professor, including a free reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 29, in the Buchanan Auditorium in the Pappajohn Business Administration Building. He will also be featured in a question-and-answer session the following day at 11 a.m. in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Dey House.

Hass, who received a UI honorary doctorate in 2010, was on the Writers' Workshop faculty when he was selected poet laureate in 1995, and he has returned to the UI on numerous occasions, including the workshop's 75th anniversary gathering last summer.

He won the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Time and Materials. He has also won the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and the William Carlos Williams Award, and he has twice received the National Books Critic Circle Award. His first book, Field Guide, earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973.

His most recent book is The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, published in 2010. In addition to his poetry and critical works, Hass has translated poetry by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda and masters of Haiku.

Hass was named Educator of the Year in 1997 by the North American Association on Environmental Education, and he is a chancellor of the Academic of American Poets.

While participating in a 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration in Berkeley Hass was struck in the ribs by a baton-wielding police officer, and his wife, UI alumna Brenda Hillman, was knocked to the ground. He recounted their experience in a New York Times column, "Poet-Bashing Police."

The Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorships Program was established in 1978-79 with the income from a bequest to the university by the late Ida Cordelia Beam of Vinton. The reading is co-presented by the Mission Creek Festival.