National Book Award for Poetry winner Mary Szybist to hold public reading

Mary Szybist, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, will be in residency at the College of Saint Benedict Oct. 2-3, and will hold a public reading at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in the Gorecki Family Theater.

Szybist was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry in 2013 for her book "Incarnadine."

She earned degrees from the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow.

In 2003, Szybist released her first collection of poetry, "Granted," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2009, she won a Witter Bynner Fellowship. Szybist also received a Bellagio Center residency from the Rockefeller Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

Her work has been published in the Iowa Review and Denver Quarterly and was featured in Best American Poetry in 2008. She currently serves as associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

During her time at CSB/SJU, Syzbist will visit with two creative writing courses, as well as take part in a faculty-staff luncheon and coffee with students.

This event is co-sponsored by the Koch Chair in Catholic Thought and Culture and Fine Arts Programming