Poet to read latest work at AU’s art museum Thursday

Special to the News
Published: May 13, 2008

Joseph Harrison III, a poet with Alabama roots, will give a reading from his newly published collection, “Identify Theft,” Thursday at 5 p.m., at Auburn University’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

Harrison was born in Richmond, Va., in 1957 and grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1979 and his master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in 1986.

His poems have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review and The Yale Review and in The Best American Poetry 1998. Harrison’s book “Someone Else’s Name” was published by Waywiser in the United Kingdom in 2003 and was named one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. He was a runner-up for the 2005 Poet’s Prize, awarded annually for the best book of verse published by an American in the previous calendar year. Also in 2005 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harrison lives in Baltimore.

The reading is cosponsored by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art and the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts. The AU Bookstore will have copies of “Identify Theft” available for purchase and signing.

A wine tasting cosponsored by the museum and Kroger will follow the reading and musician Dan Mackowski will perform.

For more information about the museum, call (334) 844-1484 or go to http://jcsm.auburn.edu/index.php.