February 21, 2000
RELEASE ON RECEIPT

AWARD-WINNING POET LEE UPTON REVISITS OBERLIN FOR READING

Lee Upton

PHOTOGRAPH BY THEODORA ZIELKOWSKI

Monday, March 6

4:45 p.m.

King Building Room 106 (corner of N. Professor and W. College streets)

Free public event

For more information please call the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program at (440) 775-6567

OBERLIN, OHIO -- Poet Lee Upton, a recipient of a National Poetry Series award, will read from her work in an appearance at Oberlin College that is co-sponsored by the creative writing program and the English Department. Upton last read at Oberlin in 1993.

A professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn., Upton is the author of four books of poetry and three books of criticism. Her fourth book of poetry, Civilian Histories, was selected as a winner in the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series and was published this year by the University of Georgia Press.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Andy Brumer says Upton's "poems about dreams transform the often mundane quality of life in an overly materialistic America into something imaginative and spiritual."

Her first book of poetry, The Invention of Kindness, was published in the University of Alabama Poetry Series. Atlantic Monthly Press published her second book of poetry, No Mercy--for which she received the National Poetry Series award. Her third book of poetry, Approximate Darling, was the recipient of the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award and was published by the University of Georgia Press.

She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and is a contributing editor of the Denver Quarterly.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, the Yale Review, the Harvard Review, the New Republic, the Boston Review and the Kenyon Review, among other journals.

She is the author of Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude and Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Her third book of criticism, The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets, appeared from Bucknell University Press in 1998.

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Media Contact: Marci Janas 2/21/00 #52 mj