SELINSGROVE, Pa. - Poet Tony Hoagland will give a reading on Monday, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m. in Susquehanna University's Isaacs Auditorium. Hoagland is the author of Sweet Ruin, winner of the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares at Emerson College. His most recent book, Donkey Gospel, is the recipient of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. The reading is free and open to the public.

The award-winning poet and recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts is the third writer to visit Susquehanna University as part of the Visiting Writers Series sponsored by Susquehanna's Writers' Institute.

Hoagland's poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Three-penny Review, AGNI, American Poetry Review and the Georgia Review, among others.

Poet Steven Cramer wrote in Ploughshares, "Hoagland's is some of the most sheerly enjoyable writing I've encountered in a long time. With his foot upon the gas/between future and past, he dazzles and rants, praises and blames, and in his keen noticings and reflections, he accomplishes pleasure on almost every leg of the journey. It's deeply gratifying to be along for the ride."

Hoagland said, "It's a real concern of mine to write about culture in a larger way, to try to make personal discourse merge with or be contextualized by cultural crises."

Hoagland currently teaches at New Mexico State University and in the Warren Wilson College MFA program. For more information, please contact Dr. Gary Fincke, professor of English and director of Susquehanna University's Writers' Institute at (570) 372-4164.

#bp/bh/1555#