The second event of the 2006-07 Sweet Briar College Writers Series will feature poet Marie Howe at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26 in the Florence Elston Inn’s Wailes Lounge. The reading is open to the public and admission is free.

Howe will read from her forthcoming book, “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time,” as well as from previous works. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni, Harvard Review and New England Review, among others.

Poet Marie Howe will read at Sweet Briar on Oct. 26. Photo by Marion Roth.
Recipient of a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Howe also is a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. Her 1998 book “The Good Thief” was chosen by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series, a yearly contest which recognizes and promotes excellence in modern poetry.

Of the selection, Atwood, author of the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” said “Marie Howe’s poetry doesn’t fool around. ... these poems are intensely felt, sparely expressed, and difficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.”

Acclaimed poet Stanley Kunitz, who picked Howe for an American Academy of Poets Lavan Younger Poets Prize, echoed Atwood’s praise, calling Howe’s work “luminous, intense [and] eloquent.”

In addition to “The Good Thief” and her forthcoming book of poetry, Howe is the author of “What the Living Do.” Written in large part as an elegy to her late brother, “What the Living Do” was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the five best volumes of poetry published in 1997.

Janet Sylvester, poet and SBC assistant professor of English, met Howe about 20 years ago. “I love Marie Howe’s work,” she said. “The apparent simplicity of it belies its hard-won vision. … Her poems dare to have simple surfaces, though their emotional content is far from that.”

The final event in the series will feature author Peter Manseau at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15 at the Pannell Gallery. Formerly of Charlottesville, Manseau is the author of “Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son” and co-author of “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible.”

Praised as “seductively well written” by Publishers Weekly, the memoir “Vows” tells the story of Manseau’s family – his father is a censured Catholic priest who refuses to resign his ordination and his mother, a former nun.

For more information, contact Sylvester at 381-6236 or jsylvester@sbc.edu .

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer