Don’t miss the launch of Marilyn Kallet’s new poetry collection at the first UT Writers in the Library reading of the spring semester. Dr. Kallet will perform poems from her new collection, Packing Light: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2009) on Monday, February 2, at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium on the University of Tennessee campus. A reception will follow the reading.

Kallet’s new book includes selections from more than 35 years of writing as well as new poems. Her poetry includes sensual love poems, song sequences, and poems on Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Of Kallet’s recent poetry, poet Yusef Komunyakaa has written, “Marilyn Kallet’s Circe, After Hours shines with a high-intensity light into the underworld of ordinary lives, creating bridges between the North and the South, America and Europe, as well as a marriage between the brain’s left and right hemispheres – reason and passion. In this marvelous collection, the process of art illuminates life’s path.”

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, including Circe, After Hours (BkMk Press) and Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard (Black Widow Press). She holds a Lindsay Young Professorship in English from the University of Tennessee, where she directed the creative writing program for 17 years. Kallet has performed her poetry in theaters and on campuses across the United States, as well as in Krakow and Warsaw as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. She teaches poetry in Auvillar as part of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts France program.

This event is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund and by Writers in the Library.

The Writers in the Library series is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the Creative Writing Program of the UT English Department. For further information, please contact Jo Anne Deeken, head of technical services, UT Libraries, at 974-6913 or jdeeken@utk.edu, or Kali Meister, Jack E. Reese writer in residence, UT Libraries, at meisterkali@gmail.com.