Smith Poetry Center Kicks Off Spring Season with Reading by Ellen Doré Watson

The season opener of the spring semester reading series at the Poetry Center at Smith College features poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson-an editor of the Five-College literary journal, The Massachusetts Review-and the new director of Smith's Poetry Center. She will read her own work, as well as translations from Portuguese and Arabic. The reading will take place at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday Feb. 22, in the Neilson Library Browsing Room.

Watson is the author of "We Live in Bodies" (Alice James Books) and a chapbook, "Broken Railings," winner of the Green Lake Chapbook Poetry Prize from Owl Creek Press. Individual poems have recently appeared in Field, Boulevard, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker.

She is the recipient of a 1997 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a 1998 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate the work of Brazilian poet Adélia Prado ("The Alphabet in the Park," Wesleyan University Press, 1990). Watson has also published seven books of prose translation, most recently Milton Hatoum's "The Tree of the Seventh Heaven" (Atheneum, 1994). The most recent issue of Modern Poetry in Translation contains several dozen contemporary Palestinian poems Watson co-translated from the Arabic with Saadi Simawe.
Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky says "Ellen Watson is an eloquent, passionate poet; generosity of imagination distinguishes both her gift for language and her emotional sympathy: interrogative, tender, wildly inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman's comic sense. And her work has the quality of movement. Watson's poetry is the real thing."

The opening of Smith's spring reading series coincides with the debut of the Poetry Center's web site (www.smith.edu/poetrycenter), which features reading schedules, sample poems and biographical information on past and future visiting poets. Over the last five semesters, Smith has brought over 30 nationally-known poets to campus. In addition to Watson's Feb. 22 reading, this spring's poets include Jay Wright on March 7, Tomaz Salamun on April 4 and Mary Oliver on April 18.
Bookselling and signing will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public. For additional information, call Cindy Furtek at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Watson at (413)585-3368.

February 2, 2000