FRIDAY: UC Alumna and Award-Winning Poet Returns to Campus to Give Elliston Reading

“Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body.... Marvin's poems are jaunty and fierce, witty and intense; she reads like a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon.” (Sarabande)

On Wednesday, Oct. 24, UC alumna Cate Marvin was awarded one of the coveted Whiting Writers' Awards for emerging authors. And now she'll be back at UC on Oct. 26 to read from her latest book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen.

Poetry reading: free and open to the public.

Who: Cate Marvin
When: Oct. 26, 2007, 4 p.m.
Where: Langsam Library's Elliston Room (Langsam 646)

Cate Marvin earned her PhD from UC's Department of English and Comparative Literature, in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. She has published three collections of poetry, including two volumes of her own work. The World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books) won the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the 2002 Kate Tufts Discover Award. The second book, which she co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis, is a  poetry anthology called Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande).

Marvin's latest book is a collection of her own poetry called Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande). In his review, Rodney Jones said, "Cate Marvin's aptly titled second collection bristles with lyricism and with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face women of this time. . . .  Fragment of the Head of a Queen makes it clear why Cate Marvin is becoming one of our essential poets."

Recognition for Marvin's Work:

Winner of the 2007 Whiting Writers’ Award (in poetry) for emerging authors
Recipient of the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Finalist for the 2002 Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from Texas Institute of Letters
Recipient of the 2001 Greenwall Fund Grant from Academy of American Poets
Winner of the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

Marvin teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and is a tenured associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

The reading is sponsored by the George Elliston Poetry Fund and the Department of English.