Poet Jean Valentine to read at Ithaca College

National Book Award winner Jean Valentine will read from her poetry at Ithaca College on Tuesday, March 17. Her free public reading, which is part of the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall.Valentine is the author of 11 volumes of poetry, including “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003,” which won the 2004 National Book Award for poetry. Her first collection, “Dream Barker,” earned her the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965. Her new chapbook, “Lucy,” is a poem that pays homage to the three million-year-old skeleton of the earliest known hominid.Named the State Poet of New York for 2008–10, Valentine has lived most of her life in New York City. She has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. She has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been awarded the Maurice English Prize, Teasdale Poetry Prize, and Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize.For more information on the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, visit http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/depts/writing/dvw/ or contact Jack Wang, assistant professor of writing, at 607-274-3493 or wang@ithaca.edu.