Irish Poet Eavan Boland and High School Prize Winners to Read at Smith

Smith College will present a reading by award-winning Irish poet Eavan Boland at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 3, in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall.

In addition, Boland will be joined by the winners of the sixth annual Smith College Poetry Prize for High School Girls in New England, for which Boland was the judge. They will read their winning poems prior to Boland’s reading. The event is free and open to the public.

Hailed by critics as “Ireland’s premier woman poet,” Boland has authored 12 volumes of poetry, most recently, “Against Love Poetry,” “Domestic Violence,” and “New Collected Poems,” which The Times Literary Supplement praised as the “finest evidence ever assembled of the escape from the grip of a tradition.”

Recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, Boland also writes prose, regularly penning reviews for The Irish Times. Her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, the Paris Review and the American Poetry Review.

Other prose works include “Object Lessons: The Life Of The Woman” and “A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet,” a brisk and quirky collection of essays which speaks to her own past and evolution as a poet and ends with a message to the young woman poet of the future.

The winner of this year’s Smith College Poetry Prize for High School Students is Taite Puhala, who attends the Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn., and the three finalists are Riley Boeth of Westover School, Middlebury, Conn.; Madeleine Chill, home-schooled in Andover, Conn.; and Kathleen Reilly of Marblehead High School, Marblehead, Mass.

The readings will be followed by a book sale and signing. For further information, contact Jennifer Blackburn in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Poetry Center director, at (413) 585-3368.

For disability access information or to request accommodations, call (413) 585-2407. To request a sign language interpreter specifically, call (413) 585-2071 (voice or TTY) or e-mail ODS@smith.edu. All requests must be made at least 10 days prior to the event.”