Poet Debra Nystrom reading at Penn State Behrend April 1, 2010

Poet Debra Nystrom will open the spring Creative Writer’s Speaker Series at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

Nystrom will read from her works at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 1, in the college’s Larry and Kathryn Smith Chapel. A reception for the author will take place in the chapel’s first-floor meeting room one-half hour before the reading.

Nystrom grew up in South Dakota, where she returns each year to family land on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. She has published three collections of poetry, Bad River Road (2009), Torn Sky and A Quarter Turn. Her work has received two grants from The Virginia Commission for the Arts as well as The Library of Virginia Poetry Award and The James Dickey Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Penn State Behrend’s annual Creative Writer’s Speaker Series is produced by the college’s B.F.A. in Creative Writing program with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund. The series also will host literary nonfiction writer Brenda Miller on Thursday, April 22, and fiction writer Joanna Howard on Thursday, April 29.

For more information about the series, phone the Penn State Behrend School of Humanities and Social Sciences at 814-898-6108.