A West Virginia University English professor will discuss modern women poets at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 4, in the Mountainlair Monongahela Room.

Mary Ann Samyns presentation, Avant-Garde: American Women Poets in the 21st Century, is part of the Center for Womens Studies Fireside Chat series.

Samyn, an assistant professor, will give an overview of early contemporary women poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich and offer a glimpse of where their followers are going with verse. She will look at poets whose work illustrates the intersections between poetry and a range of other topics and experiences, including science, criticism, motherhood, the body, visual art, religion, history, geography and language itself.

She will also discuss the value of poetry and why people, regardless of gender, continue to read and write verse.

Samyn is the author of three collections of poetry: Rooms by the Sea, Captivity Narrative and Inside the Yellow Dress. Her poems have also appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, The Ohio Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Mississippi Review, The Bitter Oleander, Pleiades, the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation and elsewhere. Her work has garnered her the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America.

She is the founder and director of Oakland Universitys Far Field Retreat for Writers in Rochester, Mich., and teaches each summer at The Controlled Burn Seminar for Young Writers at Huggins Lake, Mich.

She has a masters degree from Ohio University and a masters of fine arts degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a Hoyns Fellow.

The Fireside Chat is free and open to the public.