The West Virginia University English Departments first readings for the spring semester will feature two of its own faculty members.

Readings by Mary Ann Samyn and Ethel Morgan Smith will begin at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 11, in the Mountainlair Gold Ballroom.

Samyn is the author of two full-length collections of poetry ,_ “Inside the Yellow Dress”and”Captivity Narrative,”and a chapbook,”Rooms by the Sea.”She won the Ohio State University Press/ _The Journal Award for”Captivity Narrative,”the 2002 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America for her poem”The Beauty Zone,”and the James Wright Poetry Award from Bowling GreenStateUniversitys Mid-American Review for the poem”Under It.”

Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review and The Ohio Review, among others. She is the founder and director of the Far Field Retreat for Writers.

Smiths book,”From Whence Cometh My Help,”was published by the University of Missouri Press. She received an Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher Award in 2000. Her work has appeared in the anthologies”Grand Mothers”and”Honey Hush,”literary journals Callaloo and African American Review, and newspapers nationwide.

She has received a Bellagio Residency in Bellagio, Italy, from The Rockefeller Foundation; a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Tübingen, Germany; a DuPont Award at Randolph-Macon Womans College; and a research award from the Womens Studies Research Center at BrandeisUniversity.

A reception and book-signing will follow the readings, which are free and open to the public. For more information, call 293-3107.