News Release

Photo: To download photos, see end of story.

Armfield Poetry Festival at UNC
to feature four prizewinning poets

CHAPEL HILL - The English department's creative writing program has expanded its annual Armfield poetry reading to feature four poets reading over a two-day period at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Armfield Poetry Festival is free to the public and will take place at 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8 and 9 in the University Room of Hyde Hall, home of UNC's Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

Poets Ken Fields and Mark Doty will read Nov. 8 at 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., respectively. Poets Marie Howe and C.K. Williams will read Nov. 9 at 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., respectively.

The featured poets have awards and honors that include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

Fields, a Stanford University English professor, has written collections of poetry that include "Sunbelly" (David R. Godine, 1973) "Classic Rough News" (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He teaches the advanced poetry workshop for writing fellows at Stanford.

Doty, a University of Houston English professor, is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent book is "School of the Arts" (HarperCollins 2006). Doty has won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction for "Heaven's Coast: A Memoir" (HarperCollins 1996), a Lambda Literary Award for "Atlantis" (Harper Perennial 1995) and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for "My Alexandria" (University of Illinois Press 1993). He teaches in the masters of fine arts program at the University of Houston.

Howe's "The Good Thief" (Persea Books 1988) won the National Poetry Series. The Boston Globe called her second collection, "What the Living Do" (W. W. Norton & Company 1997), "a deeply beautiful book, with the fierce galloping pace of a great novel." Howe also has co-edited the book of essays "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic" (Persea Books 1995). She lives and teaches in New York.
Williams, a Princeton University creative writing lecturer, is winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection "Repair" (Farrar Straus Giroux) and winner of the 2003 National Book Award for "The Singing" (Farrar Straus Giroux). He has published nine poetry collections, a book of essays, a memoir and translations of Sophocles, Euripides and French poet Francis Ponge.

The Armfield Poetry Festival is made possible by a gift from the late Blanche Britt Armfield, who established the fund to champion the cause of poetry on the UNC campus. Armfield received a master of arts degree in English from UNC in 1928. For more than 20 years, leading American poets have come to Chapel Hill for the semi-annual readings. This is the first Armfield poetry event featuring multiple poets.

For information, contact festival coordinator Alan Shapiro at (919) 962-1994, ashapiro@email.unc.edu; Jenne Herbst at (919) 962-4000, jlherbst@email.unc.edu; or Michael McFee at (919) 962-3461, mcfee@unc.edu.

- 30 -

Photo URL: Doty: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/doty3.jpg
Howe: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/howe1.jpg
Williams: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/williams1.jpg

College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589