The Beck Lecture Series at Denison University will host a writer who served as State Poet of Rhode Island and curated a "walk in book of Arkansas." C.D. Wright will read from her works at 8 p.m. on Wednesday (Feb. 21) in the Faculty Lounge in Slayter Hall. Her presentation, which is also sponsored by the Ohio Poetry Circuit, is free and open to the public. Born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Wright now teaches at Brown University in Providence, R.I., her adopted state. She has published nine collections of poetry, most recently the book length poems "Deepstep Come Shining", "Tremble", and "Just Whistle". "String Light" won the 1992 Poetry Center Book Award given by San Francisco State University.

Wright has composed two state "literary maps" for Arkansas and Rhode Island, in addition to the "walk-in book of Arkansas," a multi-media exhibition which toured her native state for a two-year period. Winner of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts and Bunting Institute fellowships, she was visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in the fall of 1997. Other awards include a GE Award for literary essay, a Whiting Writers Award and the 1999 Lannan Literary Award.

Wright is undertaking a new collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster at several prisons in Louisiana. Luster and Wright won this year's Dorothea Langue-Paul Taylor Prize for their work-in-progress from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Their project is titled "One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana" and is scheduled for publication from the University of Texas Press in 2002.

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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