Poetry Center to Showcase Distinctive Literary Voices

The Poetry Center of Smith College will showcase the distinctive literary voices of two local poets who have received national acclaim--Susan Snively and Agha Shahid Ali--at a reading on Tuesday, November 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the Neilson Library Browsing Room.

Snively, who is the director of the Writing Center at Amherst College and teaches courses in writing and women's autobiographies, has published three collections of poems: "From This Distance," "Voices in the House," and, most recently, "The Undertow." Former Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur described her work as "clean-cut, fluent, witty, direct, full of personality and surprise. [She] can also be deeply meditative, grave and affecting, uproarious."

Joining Snively will be Agha Shahid Ali, who teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is a translator of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Ali is the author of five collections of poems: "The Half-Inch Himalayas," "Bone-Scupture," "In Memory of Begum Akhtar & Other Poems," "A Walk Through The Yellow Pages," and, most recently, "A Nostalgist's Map of America."

Of Ali, poet and activist Carolyn Forché has written, "Although not an American poet, Agha Shahid Ali is one of the finest young poets in America....[he] so artfully sustains his contemplation that upon entering his work we experience the play of light through the many prisms of his intelligence."

Book-selling and signing will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public.