As part of its Writers/Reading Series, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center will present six reading events throughout April at Trinity Commons and at campus locations. All readings are free and open to the public.

The series begins on Tuesday, April 1 at 7:30 p.m. with Poetry Reading with Nin Andrews and Zachary Schomburg at Trinity Commons. Nin Andrews, a Poland, Ohio, resident, is the editor of Someone Wants to Steal My Name and the author of The Book of Orgasms and Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane. Her latest collection of prose poems, Sleeping with Houdini, was recently published by BOA Editions.

Zachary Schomburg is the coeditor of the journal Octopus and the poetry press Octopus Books as well as the author of a book of poems titled The Man Suit. He is currently working on translations of the Russian poet Andrei Sen-Senkov at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he also teaches.

An Evening with Mystery Writer Walter Mosley will be held on Monday, April 14 from 6-9 p.m. in Waetjen Auditorium in the Music and Communication Building, 2001 Euclid Avenue. Mosely is the author of Devil in a Blue Dress, Bad Boy Brawly Brown and Little Scarlet. He is also the recipient of the PEN USA and PEN USA Lifetime Achievement awards. Mosley will lecture as part of the Black Studies Program’s Black Aspirations Celebration and as part of the Tombouctou Book Club author series.

Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College, is a noted poet and critic. On Wednesday, April 16 at 4 p.m., she will present A Lecture on Documentary Poetics at the University Library in Rhodes Tower, room 502. Rankine was the winner of the 1993 Cleveland State University Poetry Prize for Nothing in Nature is Private. She is also the coeditor of two seminal anthologies, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: When Lyric Meets Language and American Poets of the 21st Century: The New Poetics.

The Poetry Reading with Bern Mulvey and Claudia Rankine will be on Thursday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m. in the Main Classroom Building, located at 1899 East 22 Street.

Mulvey’s The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the 2007 winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. He is also the Dean of Faculty at Miyazaki International College in Japan.

On Monday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m., A Reading by Winners of the Student Creative Writing Contest: Spring 2008 will be held at Trinity Commons.

Poetry Reading with Kazim Ali and Philip Metres will be on Thursday, April 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Trinity Commons. Ali is the author of two poetry books, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day, as well as Quinn’s Passage, a novel. Metres is the author of To See the Earth, a full-length poetry collection published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. He has also written Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 and is the translator, from Russian, of Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky.

Trinity Commons is located at the corner of Euclid Ave. and East 22nd Street, across from Cleveland State's Main Classroom Building. Free guarded parking is available off Prospect Ave., east of East 22nd Street.

Please call the Cleveland State University Poetry Center at 216-687-3986 for more information. Activities of the Poetry Center are under the auspices of the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

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