Poet Allison Joseph to be featured in reading on Thursday, Dec. 1

Poet Allison Joseph will be reading from her works on Thursday, Dec. 1, at Tusculum College.

The program, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in the Chalmers Conference Center in the Niswonger Commons on campus. The reading is part of the Department of Humanities Lecture Series.

Joseph directs the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, serves as the poetry editor of the Crab Orchard Review and as director of the Young Writers Workshop, an annual summer residential creative writing workshop for high school writers. She holds the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professorship at Southern Illinois.

She has published several books including, “What Keeps Us Here,” “Soul Train,” “In Every Seam,” “Imitation of Life” and “Worldly Pleasures.” Her most recent collection, “My Father’s Kites” was published in 2010.

Her writing has garnered several honors including the Ampersand Press Women Poets Series Prize, the John C. Zacharis Prize and the Word Press Poetry Prize. She has also been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences and the Illinois Arts Council.

A question and answer session with Joseph is scheduled at 4 p.m., also in the Chalmers Conference Center.