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On Wednesday, March 16 at 7:30 p.m., Diane Wakoski, award-winning poet and professor of English at Michigan State University, will be the guest for the ÂÌñÒùÆÞ Contemporary Writers Series. The reading will take place in the Aquinas Wege Student Center Ballroom. On Thursday, March 17 at 12:30 p.m., she will also give a talk in the Loutit Room, Wege Student Center. The events are free and open to the public.

Wakoski has published more than forty collections of poems including the four books that constitute her series "The Archaeology of Movies and Books" (Argonaut Rose 1998), "The Emerald City of Las Vegas" (Black Sparrow Press 1995), "Jason the Sailor" (Black Sparrow Press 1993) and "Medea the Sorceress" (Black Sparrow Press 1991), "Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 (188) won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and "The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13." She has also published four books of essays.

Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and Michigan Council for the Arts. She is frequently named among the foremost contemporary American poets by virtue of her experiential vision and her unique voice according to Paul Zweig in the New York Times Book Review. In 2003 she received the Author of the Year award from the Michigan Library Association.

The ÂÌñÒùÆÞ Contemporary Writers Series was founded by a grant from Dr. Tony Foster '73 and Linda Nemec Foster '72. The series kicked off in 1997 by bringing well-known authors to ÂÌñÒùÆÞ for a public reading and a workshop with students.