11/4/96 Contact: Joyce Barlow Dodd, 614/593-4181
ATHENS, Ohio -- Michelle Boisseau and David Citino, two nationally known poets and graduates of Ohio University, will join new faculty members Joan Connor and Mark Halliday for Writers Harvest at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 14 in Irvine Auditorium on Ohio University's Athens campus. The r eading is being presented by the Program in Creative Writing.
The four will participate in the literary benefit with a reading from their works to benefit hunger relief in southeast Ohio. Admission will be $5, and all proceeds will be distributed to the Southeast Ohio Food Bank. Tickets may be purchased only at the door, beginning at 7 p.m.
The event is part of a national program that includes more than 500 readings around the country. The national effort is coordinated by Share Our Strength, one of the nation's largest hunger relief organizations, that benefits local food banks around the country.
"Ohio University has, throughout the years, been rich with gifted writers," said Joyce Barlow Dodd, coordinator of special programs in creative writing. "We couldn't be more pleased to participate in this literary event that will directly help hungry people in our community.
"This is an exceptional group of writers," she said. "They are dynamic and entertaining write rs, on the stage as well as on the page."
Boisseau received a bachelor's degree Summa Cum Laude in 1977 and master's degree in 1980, both from Ohio University, and she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Houston in 1985. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, No Private Life and Understory, which won the 1996 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press. Other poems, short stories, reviews and essays have appeared in The Geo rgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Poetry and The Ohio Review.
Citino graduated from Ohio University in 1969 and received a master's degree in 1972 and Ph.D. in 1974, both from Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry including The Weight of the Heart, The Discipline: New and Selected Poems, 1982-1990, The House of Memory and The Gift of Fire. A new book, Broken Symmetry, will be published in 1997. Citino's numerous awards include a Major Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Poet of the Year, The Nancy Dasher Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry.
Connor is new to the Ohio University creative writing faculty. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Mount Holyoke College, her master's degree from Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College and her M.F.A. from Vermont College. She has published more than 40 short stories in magazines and journals including Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Mississippi Valley Review, The North American Review, and The Ohio Review. She has stories forthcoming in The Ohio Writer, The Gettysburg Review, and The Connecticut Review. Connor's awards include fellowships at Vermont Studio Academy, The McDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Yaddo. She was also selected for the Phillip Roth Fellowship at Bucknell University. Connor's collection of short sto ries, Here on Route 7 (and Other New England Stories), will be published by the University of Missouri Press in 1997.
Halliday also joined the creative writing faculty this year. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Brown University and his Ph.D. in English and American literature from Brandeis University. His first book of poems, Little Star, was a National Poetry Series selection. His second book, Tasker Street, was the winner of the Juniper Prize in 19 91. He is the author of two critical books, The Sighted Singer, conversations with Allen Grossman on poetry and poetics and Stevens and the Interpersonal. Halliday's poems and fiction have been published in several publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and The Ohio Review.
Books by the writers will be available for purchase at a book signing and reception immediately following the reading.