Poet Margaret Gibson, whose work has been nominated five times for the Pulitzer Prize, will read from her work and answer questions at a public forum on the Brenau University campus Friday, April 4, at 12 noon. There is no admission charge for the event, which will be held in the SUB on the second floor above the Tea Room on the Gainesville campus.

Gibson has published nine books. In addition to the Pulitzer nominations, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. Now professor emeritus of the University of Connecticut, she held the Ferrol A. Sams, Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University in 2007. She lives in Preston, Conn., and appears at Brenau as part of the Georgia Poetry Circuit.

Among her books, "Long Walks in the Afternoon" was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets in 1982, "Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti" was co-winner of the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986-87, and "The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993. She will be reading from these, as well as from her most recent collection, "One Body," published this year by Louisiana State University Press. Her memoir, "The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood," has just been published by the University of Missouri Press.
Her poems, which range from treatises on global warming to Psalm-like praises of God, the earth and nature, have been praised as "acts of exuberant affirmation," as one critic stated, although the works are "never shirking their necessary engagement with the darker truths."

"Poems about the natural world that take into consideration what we have done to it, or poems that have to do with global warming or the desecration of natural cycles are not necessarily pretty," Gibson said in a recent interview at the University of Georgia, where she also was scheduled to appear this week. "It is a way of facing the relationship between men and women and the natural world in our time."

For more information about Gibson´s Brenau appearance call 770-534-6195.