The Beck Lecture Series at Denison will open the 2001/02 schedule with Terri Ford, a Cincinnati-area writer, at 8 p.m. on Thursday (Sept. 27) in the Faculty Lounge, Slayter Hall. The reading is free and open to the public.

Author ofWhy the Ships Are She(Four Way Books), Ford has taught creative writing classes at several levels, from third graders at an elementary school to college students at Northern Kentucky University. While earning a living as a legal secretary for an attorney specializing in corporate real estate, Ford's poetry has earned her fellowships and recognition by the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Arts Council.

Her 1999 fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council,included serving as a poet-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. that summer. Her poem "Mister Hymen" won first place in a competition sponsored by Conduit magazine amd her poems have appeared in a number of small press magazines including Agni, Southern Poetry Review, Evil Dog and Forklift, Ohio. Ford also has a poem rendered in jumbo Braille on a sculpture in the Columbus library.

In addition to writing poetry, Ford performs as a poet solo and with her one-man band, Uncle Glockenspiel, at Cincinnati area schools and libraries. She will appear in Aralee Strange's forthcoming independent film,This Train. She also teaches workshops in performance at Gemini Ink in San Antonio, Texas, at the New Hampshire Writer's Center and at Dartmouth.

Ford earned her bachelor's degree in English at College of St. Scholastica (Duluth, Minn.), studying abroad her junior year at Richmond College, London. She also holds a master of fine arts degree from Warren Wilson College (Swannanoa, N.C.).

The Beck Lecture Series was endowed in memory of Harriet Ewens Beck to bring outstanding writers to the Denison campus. The series has hosted such writers as Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Tom Stoppard and W.S. Merwin. Under the sponsorship of the fund, 10 to 12 writers read from their works and participate in master classes each year.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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