GUILD GATHERING

The Authors Guild Foundation held its annual fund-raising dinner on Monday. Receiving the distinguished service award was Kyle Zimmer, president and co-founder of First Book, which helps children from low-income households acquire and read their first new books.

Host Roy Blount Jr. kept everyone laughing with his drawling Southern humor. He told of getting the “almost-perfect” letter from a fan. It came from a woman who had read “Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor.” She said the selections were the perfect length. They were all funny. She had learned of new writers from it. But then she ended the letter: “this was the best two dollars I ever spent,” tipping off Mr. Blount that she had bought it used or at a garage sale, and there would be no royalties forthcoming for him or any of the writers.

Seen at the event were Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham; Barbara Taylor Bradford; Authors Guild Foundation president Sidney Offit; children’s book author Mary Pope Osborne; A.E. Hotchner; Owen Laster of the William Morris Agency; Scott Turow; Lawrence Block; Sallie Bingham; Tom Dwyer, an executive with Borders Group, Inc.; Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Presidio Books at Penguin Group (USA); Lisa Dierbeck, author of “One Pill Makes You Smaller: A Novel,” recently issued in paperback by Picador.

Also seen was writer and Ms. magazine co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She has written eight nonfiction titles and, more recently, her first novel, “Three Daughters.” She is halfway into finishing her second. “It is so different from writing nonfiction, so much deeper, it is like a new career,” she said. She talked about how the Authors Guild helps keeps books in print for writers – electronically, at least.

From the podium, Mr. Blount offered a few thoughts about writers and touring, as well. He said writers should get actors to impersonate them and tour for them, since actors look better than most writers and are trained to say the same things over and over, to name just two reasons. But since most writers can’t afford to hire actors, he does not expect that to happen. He also said it was a good thing that there is no peer pressure for writers to compete in showing their midriffs. But he is sure that will change – “within 20 years.” He also pondered a question authors are sometimes asked: “What were you thinking when you wrote that?” He said he is inclined to read the section aloud and say, “I was thinking that when I wrote that.”

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DAN RATHER, REPORTING (POETRY)

The American conscience was the theme of the Third annual Academy of American Poets reading Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall. In celebration of the 10th anniversary of National Poetry Month, the Empire State Building was in blue and white, the colors of the academy.

“Good evening. I know what you are thinking,” said veteran newsman Dan Rather after walking onstage. There was a long pause. “You are thinking, I must know someone important to read a poem after Meryl Streep.”

Mr. Rather read Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Death of a Soldier,” written in 1931, the year of his own birth. He said that by conservative estimate, 410,000 American soldiers had died since that poem was written.

Actress Minnie Driver was the most surprising wit on stage, as well as a superb reader. At the prep school she attended, students were sometimes punished by being told to “get out of class and go read a poem.” She learned to love poetry this way.

Jorie Graham ended the reading with a tribute to Robert Creeley, who died last week. She read his poem “Goodbye,” which ends:

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,
did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.

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ACADEMIC STAR

University of California at Berkeley professor Samuel Scheffler delivered the annual law and philosophy lecture sponsored by the Center for Law and Philosophy and the John Dewey Endowment. The talk addressed critics of the late Harvard professor John Rawls’s claim that principles of justice apply primarily to the “basic structure of society.”

Columbia Law School professor Jeremy Waldron, who was recently named university professor, introduced Mr. Scheffler. The dean of the law school, David Schizer, offered opening remarks. He recalled running the committee for hiring new faculty to the school, and how the eyes of the new faculty would widen upon meeting Mr. Waldron as though they were meeting a movie star. “I think of you as the Russell Crowe of the legal academy,” Mr. Schizer. He told the audience, “I give you Russell Crowe.”

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KNICK-KNACKS

Mitchell S. Steir, chairman and CEO of Studley, the commercial real estate company, has been elected to the board of trustees of the Museum of the City of New York … Linda Ferber, chairwoman of the American Art Department at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, will join the New-York Historical Society as its new vice president of the museum department … Anthropologist Ann Stoler has been named Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor at the New School University … Conservative writer and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham is engaged to be married to James V. Reyes, 42, a Washington businessman. A late spring wedding is planned. They will live in Washington, D.C.