Bosnian poet Ferida Durakovíc, recipient of a P.E.N. Award for keeping the Sarajevo writers' center open throughout the long siege, will read from Heart of Darkness, her first collection to appear in English. She will be joined by Christopher Merrill, sharing excerpts about Durakovíc from his most recent prose work, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars.

The evening also features the screening of a recent "ABC Nightline" portrait of the poet and her besieged city, directed by Phil Alden Robinson ("Sneakers", "Field of Dreams").

At eighty-four, poet Ruth Stone has just published her eleventh book, Ordinary Words, but her work is anything but ordinary. The poet Sharon Olds calls Stone's work "dazzling, original, fearless, funny, and deeply moving." Stone has received many grants & honors, including the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, where she has lived for many years

Distinguished poet Philip Levine is the author of 16 collections of poems, including The Simple Truth, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, What Work Is, winner of the National Book Award, Ashes: Poems New & Old, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for poetry, and, most recently, The Mercy.

Levine is committed "to saving from oblivion what is thought of as ordinary life" (poet Edward Hirsch). His work celebrates memory, family, the working class, and the immigrant experience, and has been an inspiration to a generation of young American poets.

British poet and painter Frieda Hughes' work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and London Magazine and now in Wooroloo, her first full-length collection. Hughes is the daughter of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and American poet Sylvia Plath.

The Sylvia Plath Collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Room contains Plath's journals, letters, drafts of the Ariel poems, as well as first editions of works by Ted Hughes, and children's books written and illustrated by Ms. Hughes.

Palestinian-American poet and political activist Suheir Hammad has published a volume of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, and a memoir, Drops Of This Story and is prominently featured in Listen Up! An Anthology Of Spoken Word Poetry. Naomi Shihab Nye has called her work "a brave flag over the dispossessed."

Poet, dramatist, novelist, and musician Carl Hancock Rux recently released a volume of poems, Pagan Operetta and a poetry/music CD Rux Revue, which explores combinations of poetry, soul, rock, hip-hop, jazz, and folk blues. He has performed all over the world and was selected by The New York Times Magazine as "One of Thirty Artists Under the Age of Thirty Most Likely to Influence Culture Over the Next Thirty Years."

Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson is the author of We Live In Bodies and Broken Railings, and has published individual poems widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker.

Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, the Rona Jaffee Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, she has nine books of translation in print, including The Alphabet in the Park, selected poems of Brazilian Adélia Prado. Watson is an editor at The Massachusetts Review and Director of the Poetry Center at Smith.

Author of eight books of poems, most recently Boleros, Jay Wright has received many honors, including awards from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Ingram Merrill foundations, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 1996 he was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement. The citation described his poems as "miracles of visionary energy, moralized lyricism, and a buoyant, complex mythmaking."

Author of 25 volumes of poems in his native Slovenia, Tomaz Salamun has received many prizes in Europe and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

His work has been translated into English by Charles Simic and Christopher Merrill, among others, and has won praise from James Tate, Robert Creeley, Jorie Graham, and Robert Hass, who celebrate Salamun's "love of the poetics of rebellion."

Salamun has three books in English, including Selected Poems (Ecco Press) and The Four Questions Of Melancholy. A new collection, Feast, is forthcoming from Harcourt Brace.