The West Virginia University Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will host a free public reading by West Virginia’s poet laureate Irene McKinney at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14Valentine’s Dayin the Mountainlair Gold Ballroom.

McKinney is the author of five books of poetry:The Six O’Clock Mine Report,Quick Fire and Slow Fire,The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons,The Girl with a Stone in Her LapandVivid Companion.She also edited the anthologyBackcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia.

According to David Baker, poetry editor of The Kenyon Review, McKinneywrites with a strong soul, a great ear and a commanding vista. She knows the trees, the birds, the manners and the difficult history of Appalachian America; she knowsthe ways of the human heart.

McKinney is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a West Virginia Commission on the Arts fellowship in poetry. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and New York’s Blue Mountain Writers’Conference. She currently teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan College and has been writer in residence at Western Washington University and the University of New Mexico.

She received her doctorate from the University of Utah in 1980, her master’s degree from West Virginia University in 1970 and graduated cum laude from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1968.

I can’t think of a better way to spend Valentine’s Day than in the presence of Irene McKinney, whose love of life fills her poems,said Jim Harms, director of WVU ’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.Her work celebrates the joy and the trials of day-to-day life; her poems have the power to make us less alone with our loss, more grateful for our blessings.

For more information, contact Harms at 304-293-3107 ext. 33451.