The West Texas A&M University Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) welcomes poets Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and Jenn Givhan for a poetry reading at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 3 in the Sybil B. Harrington Fine Arts Center Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Villarreal is the author of the novel “Beast Meridian.” She is a recipient of multiple writing awards including a 2019 Whiting Award and a 2018 Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize. Villarreal’s work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Boston Review and The Rumpus.

Givhan is a poet and novelist with more than 100 publications. She graduated from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina where she earned an MFA in poetry, and she earned a master’s in English literature from California State University Fullerton.

Givhan has earned many awards for her work including a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the 2019 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and the 2017 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Boston Review and more.

There will also be a poetry writing discussion from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in the Cornette Library Blackburn room earlier that day, which is also open to the public.

This program is co-sponsored by the WT Spanish Program, Center for the Study of the American West and the Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages.

-West Texas A&M University