Mary Szybist has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember.

“I can’t remember a time that I did not write poetry, though I can’t remember much about my junior high years,” Szybist, an assistant professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., said. “Perhaps I didn’t write poetry then.”

Mary Szybist will read March 27 at Sweet Briar. For 10 of her 36 years, Szybist worked on her first book of poetry, “Granted,” published by Alice James Books in 2003. The decade of effort paid off when it was selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“I was very lucky,” Szybist said of the accolade. “It was an honor and a thrill.”

At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, March 27, Szybist – pronounced “she bist” – will read from “Granted” and other works as part of the spring installment of the Sweet Briar College Writers Series.

The reading will be held in the Wailes Lounge of the Florence Elston Inn and Conference Center. Admission is free.

“Szybist’s gentle poetry balances humor and reverence,” Chris Hallman, Sweet Briar’s writer-in-residence and a friend of the author, said. “She’s smart without being obtuse. This is a poet whom you read, and then expect to recognize walking down the street.”

Calling Hallman a “generous reader,” Szybist said, “I’d love to write poems that achieve exactly the things that he describes. I don’t want to write poems that are reverent in a simple, sugar-sweet way, and I don’t want to write poems that are irreverent in a simple, predictable, adolescent, shock-value way. I hope that humor helps me to avoid those extremes.”

The Christian Science Monitor echoed Szybist’s modesty, praising the poet for her “intelligence and understated grace” yet predicting, “Szybist may become one of the best-known writers of her generation.”

Of “Granted,” the Monitor wrote Szybist “explores a timeless theme – spiritual and romantic longing. In page after page, she wrestles with faith and hope, struggling to find peace by finding freedom from desire. In the process, she lures readers into a hidden place somewhere between intellect and silence.”

Szybist’s poem “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly” embodies these qualities:

Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light –
When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.
When I am tired of only touching,
I have my mouth to try to tell you
what, in your arms, is not erased.

Although the poet said many people would describe her as “rather quiet and introverted,” she insists “self-expression” is not the impetus of her poetry. “Most of the time I’d rather write than speak,” she said.

“I can’t say that I view poetry primarily as self-expression. I rarely have something to say when I begin a poem, but I do find poems to be enchanted spaces for engagement and discovery.”

Szybist was the 2002 Beatrice Hawley Award winner, recipient of the 2004 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was listed among the “Best Poetry of 2003” by Library Journal. She also was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Ron Jaffe Foundation Writing Award.

She hails from Pennsylvania, and has degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she was a teaching-writing fellow. Her poems have been featured in The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review and other journals.

The writers series will conclude April 18 with novelist Carrie Brown. Next up in the series will be novelist Carrie Brown at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18 in the Pannell Gallery. Brown, visiting assistant professor of English at Sweet Briar, will read from her soon-to-be-released book, “The Rope Walk.”

Brown also is the author of “The House of Belle Isle,” “Rose’s Garden,” “Lamb in Love,” “The Hatbox Baby,” and “Confinement,” winner of the Library of Virginia Book Award.

Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia.

For more information on the writers series, contact John Gregory Brown at brown@sbc.edu or 381-6434.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer