Two poets featured in WFU’s fall Writers Reading Series

On Sept. 29, Mark Jarman will read at 7 p.m. in Tribble Hall’s DeTamble Auditorium. The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Jarman has written eight books of poetry, including his latest, “To the Green Man,” published in 2004, and two collections of essays. For his poetry, he has won a Joseph Henry Jackson Award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His book “The Black Riviera” won the 1991 Poets’ Prize. “Questions for Ecclesiastes” was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.

Both his poetry and essays have been widely published in periodicals and journals, including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry and The Southern Review. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Debra Nystrom will be the featured poet in October. She will read Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. in DeTamble Auditorium, with a reception and book signing following the reading.

Nystrom’s latest work is “Torn Sky,” published in 2003. She has also written a volume of poems titled “A Quarter Turn.” Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares and The Threepenny Review.

She has received awards from Borders bookstores, The American Anthropological Society, Shenandoah Magazine and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She has been awarded individual artist’s grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, a Yaddo Fellowship and a postgraduate fellowship in poetry from the University of Virginia. She currently teaches in the University of Virginia’s creative writing program.

The Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the English department. All readings are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Dennis Sampson at sampsod@wfu.edu or at 336-758-5390.