4/9/97 Contact: Joyce Barlow Dodd, Ohio University, 614/593-4181

ATHENS, Ohio -- Essayist, poet and critic Diana Hume George will present a free, public reading of her work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 16 in Galbreath Chapel on Ohio University's Athens campus.

George's book of essays, The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1996. The essays' themes range from recounting her life as a white teen-age bride on an American Indian reservation to facing her father's suicide.

Her collections of poems include Koyaanisqatsi, The Resurrection of the Body and The Evolution of the Body. She also has written and edited a number of critical books, including The Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (with Diane Wood Middlebrook), Blake and Freud (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and named "Outstanding Book of 1980" by Choice magazine), Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton, and Silent Parenting: Family Care Issues in Academe (with Constance Coiner). Her poetry, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Ohio Review and Best American Essays. George also is a free-lance writer for Ms. magazine.

George has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

George is a professor of English/creative writing and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University at Erie, The Behrend College. She is writing a book of personal essays about living among the Iroquois Nation (Seneca tribe) titled White Woman.

The reading is sponsored by the Program in Creative Writing in the Ohio University Department of English.