September 7, 2001 SELINSGROVE, Pa. - Award-winning poet Karen Holmberg will read from her recently published book The Perseids at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 17, in the Degenstein Campus Center's Shearer Dining Room at Susquehanna University. The reading is open to the public without charge. An assistant professor of English who joined the Susquehanna faculty this fall, Holmberg's passion for poetry sprouted from science. "My father was a scientist and I grew up with a microscope in my room," says Holmberg. "I think that as a child I acquired a fascination with magnification, by the world of the small being blown up and inspected." The Perseids, her first book of poetry, was published by the University of North Texas Press. "I think the book deals with biology and the natural world," Holmberg says of the collection. "The title poem is about the Perseids star shower which passes every August. The poem is really about seeing the natural world up close through investigation, almost like a spiritual exercise." The book won the 2000 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Holmberg is also a two-time winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has had her work published in The Paris Review, Slate, and The Nation. Gary Fincke, professor of English and director of the Writers' Institute at Susquehanna University, says Holmberg's work is ambitious in its attempt to get beyond the surface. "She writes poems that arrive somewhere," says Fincke. "The poems often end somewhere the reader doesn't anticipate." The Perseids is available in the Susquehanna University campus bookstore. Contact: Sam Alcorn 570-372-4119 #sa/266#