Poetry Center to Present Readings by Addonizio, Jackson, Song

The Poetry Center of Smith College will present readings by three women poets at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, December 8, in Helen Hills Hills Chapel.

Kim Addonizio, who teaches at Vista College in Berkeley, Calif., is the author of "The Philosopher's Club," "Jimmy and Rita," and co-author with Dorianne Laux of "The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry." She has taught at universities, prisons, senior centers, and hospitals. Among her awards is a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Erica Jong writes of Addonizio: "She grasps the central problem of human mortality and evokes it with images that we have not seen before. She knows that 'what we create may save us.'"

Angela Jackson, raised and educated in Chicago, has written several books of poetry, including "VooDoo/Love Magic," "The Greenville Club," "Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E," and "Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners," which won the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the 1994 Carl Sandberg Award for Poetry. The Sun-Times credits Jackson with "[enhancing] the craft and quality of poetry." Many of her poems explore identity, creativity, spiritual experience and the rites and rituals of race and sexuality.

Cathy Song, born in Honolulu, Hawaii, is the author of "Picture Bride," "Frameless Windows, Squares of Light" and "School Figures." Her work has appeared in an anthology of Asian-Pacific literature, "Dark Horse," "The Greenfield Review" and "West Branch." In 1982 she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. The late Richard Hugo, judge of the competition, called Song's poems "flowers: colorful, sensual, and quiet. She often reminds a loud, indifferent, hard world of what truly matters to the human spirit."

The reading, which is free and open to the public, is the fourth in the 1998-99 Poetry Center Series. Bookselling and signing will immediately follow the event.