Athens, Ga – Acclaimed poet Dorianne Laux will give a free, public reading at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 13 at Ciné BarCafeCinema, 234 West Hancock Street in Athens. The reading is sponsored by The Georgia Review, the award-winning literary quarterly published by the University of Georgia since 1947 and the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a consortium of colleges and universities across the state that cooperates to bring nationally-recognized poets to Athens and elsewhere three times a year. UGA instructor and poet Heather Cousins will be the opening reader.
Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from
Mills College in 1988. She is the author of Facts about the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (BOA Editions ,1994), also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry.
“Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion,” said poet Tony Hoagland.
Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, N.C., where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University’s MFA Program.
Cousins lives in Monroe. She holds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the UGA creative writing program. Her first book, Something in the Potato Room, won the 2009 Kore Press First Book Competition. She has poems published or forthcoming in The Yalobusha Review, Alehouse, and The Country Dog Review. One of her poems has recently been nominated for a 2010 Pushcart prize.
For more information on Laux, see www.doriannelaux.com/events.html.For more information on the The Georgia Review, contact 706/542-3481 or see www.uga.edu/garev or tgrblog.blogspot.com.