Meredith Cashman '06 was recently selected as a top 10 contestant in Matty Idol, a Boston-area American Idol spinoff. She auditioned with more than 300 people and is now competing for a chance to make it to the final three and sing alongside Nick Lachey and other artists at the KISS concert in Boston on Saturday, May 20. Voting for the top 10 takes place on the Kiss 108 website. After the concert, a winner will be chosen through text message voting to win $10,000. The final rounds of the competition take place today, tomorrow, Friday and Saturday.
Stanley Kunitz, a poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Dartmouth professor, died Sunday. Kunitz, who was 100 years old, passed away in the early hours of the morning while asleep in his Manhattan home. Kunitz was honored with the National Book Award in 1955 and a National Medal of Arts in 1993 and named Poet Laureate in 2000. He wrote 10 volumes of poetry -- all of which have been translated into 12 languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Russian. The self-proclaimed pacifist, who was outspoken against the Vietnam and Iraq Wars and worked tirelessly for civil liberties, once said, "On the one hand, I am against war in principle; on the other, I have spent a good part of my life opposing fascism and bigotry and injustice and anything that degrades or insults the human spirit." Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kunitz went on to receive bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard College. His first book of poetry was published in 1930 and his last in 2005. Kunitz taught at a number of institutions in addition to Dartmouth, including Bennington College in Vermont, Columbia University, Yale University and Princeton University. He is survived by his daughter Gretchen.
