Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass talks about What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World ($29.99), a wide-ranging collection of considerations on topics including writers (ranging from Jack London to Allen Ginsberg), the art of photography, the state of California, and much else.

Robert Hass will be introduced by poet Giovanni Singleton.

Robert Hass' books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass has worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen volumes of the Nobel Prize winner's poetry. While his translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Hass' books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, and Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000. From 1995 to 1997 Hass served as poet laureate of the United States.