11-14-08

Media Release

Visiting Writer Series Features Young Poets

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Averill Curdy, V. Penelope Pelizzon and Jeffrey Thomson will read poetry as part of a Symposium of Younger Poets, an event designed to showcase young, diverse poets early in their careers. The event will be held on Friday, Nov. 21, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Valley Library Main Rotunda at Oregon State University.

Pelizzon’s first poetry collection, “Nostos” (Ohio University Press, 2000), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, “The Monongahela Book of Hours,” have been published in Field and The Missouri Review. She is an associate professor of English and co-director of creative writing at The University of Connecticut.

Curdy is co-editor of the “Longman Anthology of Poetry” (December 2005), and her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Slate, Western Humanities Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches poetry as artist-in-residence at Northwestern University.

Thomson’s third book of poems, “Renovation,” was part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press poetry series in 2005. In 2009, he will have three new books: his fourth collection of poems, “Birdwatching in Wartime”(CMU Press), a collection of poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, “Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel” (Green Integer), and an edited anthology of poems by emerging poets, “From the Fishhouse.” He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Maine, Farmington.

Sponsored by the OSU English Department, the Valley Library, and the Office of the Provost, the Visiting Writers Series readings are free and open to the public.