Nationally recognized poet to lead MSU program next week

Contact: Kenneth Billings

STARKVILLE, Miss.--Award-winning author Martha Collins will read from her works in a free Thursday [April 9] program at Mississippi State.

Sponsored by the university's English department and Institute for the Humanities of the College of Arts and Sciences, the 7:30 event takes place in the third-floor Fowlkes Auditorium of the Colvard Student Union.

In addition to serving as editor-at-large for FIELD magazine, Collins is an editor of the Oberlin (Ohio) College Press.

She is the author of "Blue Front," a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed as a youth. Her work won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was included among the New York Public Library's "25 Books to Remember from 2006."

Previously, Collins founded the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and, for a decade, was Oberlin's Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

For more information, telephone the English department at 662-325-3644.

For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.