Award-winning New York poet to read in Frostic Series

KALAMAZOO—A New York City poet and winner of the National Book Award and several other high honors will read from her works early next month at Western Michigan University as part of the spring 2013 Gwen Frostic Reading Series. Jean Valentine will read at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Little Theatre. The poetry reading is free and open to the public.

Jean Valentine

Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, "Dream Barker," in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is "Break the Glass," published in 2010.

"Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003" won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Valentine was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in spring 2008.

Valentine has won a long list of other awards for her poems. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also won a Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.

She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

About the series

The Frostic Reading Series presents acclaimed creative writers from across the nation and beyond. Every year, a diverse range of readings that encompasses poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama attract both campus and off-campus audiences.

For more information, visit wmich.edu/english/events/frostic.html.