The Department of English and the Department of Foreign Languages at West Virginia University will host a free public reading by poet Maurice Kilwein Guevara at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 23, in the Robinson Reading Room of the Wise Library.

Guevara is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee , where he teaches in the master’s and doctoral programs in creative writing as well as in the Latino Studies Program.

He is the author of three collections of poetry,Postmortem,which won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition in 1994;Poems of the River Spirit;andA utobiography of So-and-So: Poems in Prose .

His work has appeared inPoetry,Parnassus ,Ploughshares,Exquisite Corpse,Kenyon Review,TriQuarterlyand The Journal of the American Medical Association .

His poetry has been anthologized inTouching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance(Anchor/Doubleday),American Poetry: the Next Generation(Carnegie Mellon University Press),The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology(U. Press of New England), andNo Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets(Tupelo Press), among others.

His play, The Last Bridge/El ultimo puente , was performed by the Off-Broadway production company Urban Stages.

A reception and book signing will follow the reading.