Bestselling poet to give public reading, work with students

The University of Southern Indiana will host bestselling poet Kathleen Driskell for a public reading of her poetry at 7 p.m. Wednesday, January 25 in the Rice Library Reading Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Driskell is the author of the poetry collections Next Door to the Dead, Laughing Sickness, Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem and Seed Across Snow, which is a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review and Mid-American Review, as well as being featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and American Life in Poetry.

She is an Al Smith Fellow of the Kentucky Arts Council and has received awards from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Associated Writing Programs and the Frankfort Arts Foundation. She currently serves as the Associate Editor of The Louisville Review and as program director for Spalding University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. Driskell received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The event is sponsored by USI's Core 39 Speaker Series, Academic Affairs and the Department of Communications Program in Communication Studies. For more information, contact Dr. Leigh Anne Howard at lahoward@usi.edu or at 912-476-9398.