Poetry Center to Present Joint Reading February 9

The Poetry Center at Smith College presents a joint reading with Mark Doty and Adrienne Su at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, February 9, in Stoddard auditorium.

Doty is perhaps best known for his 1996 memoir, "Heaven's Coast," in which he explores spiritual resilience and mortality in the wake of his lover's death from AIDS. The memoir was the winner of the PEN Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction and was named a Notable Book of the Year by "The New York Times Book Review."

Doty's five books of poems, which include "My Alexandria" and "Sweet Machine," have received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and England's T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry. The poems in "My Alexandria" are a series of meditations on mortality and life, beauty and loss. The collection is haunted by the spectre of AIDS, transfigured by Doty's ranging imagination, effortless skill and huge emotional power.

These poems--exquisite hymns of grief that are honest and unsentimental--offer readers sensual joy, redemption, and a way through despair.

Doty's newest memoir, "Firebird," will be published later in the year.

Doty lives both in Houston, where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Houston, and Provincetown, Mass.

A native of Atlanta, Adrienne Su, author of "Middle Kingdom," studied at Harvard and the University of Virginia and currently lives in Iowa City. In 1995 she was the first Ralph Samuel Poetry Fellow at Dartmouth College. Of Su's work the "Virginia Quarterly Review" writes, "Here is a fresh and profound voice heralding new cultural bridges in poetry...dynamic, fluid, and fantastically readable poems."

The readings are free and open to the public. Bookselling and signing will follow.