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UAF

Ed Skoog

UAF

Sean Hill

Fairbanks — One of the main goals of the Midnight Sun Visiting Writers Series at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is to expose students and community members to various writing genres. Fiction, nonfiction, memoir and others have already been represented during the 2008-09 series, and poetry is up next.

Two poets — Sean Hill and Ed Skoog — will participate in a literary reading at 7 p.m. today at the UA Museum of the North. The reading is free and open to the public.

Hill is a Georgia native who earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He’s been awarded a number of fellowships for his work, including the 2003 Michener Fellowship for poetry and others from Cave Canem, the Bush Foundation, the MacDowell Colony and the University of Wisconsin. His poems have appeared in “Callaloo,” “Indiana Review,” “Lyric Poetry Review,” “Crab Orchard Review,” “Ninth Letter” and other publications as well as anthologies. He recently received a travel and study grant from the Jerome Foundation and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first published book, “Blood Ties and Brown Liquor,” was published by the University of Georgia Press in March 2008.

Born in Topeka, Kansas, Skoog attended Topeka High School, Kansas State University and the University of Montana. After many years in New Orleans, he now lives, teaches and writes in Seattle.

Skoog’s first poetry collection, “Mister Skylight,” will be published by Cooper Canyon Press this year. Individual poems have appeared in “Paris Review,” “American Poetry Review,” “Ploughshares,” “The New Republic” and others. In 2005 he was awarded the Marble Faun Prize in Poetry by the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Society. He has worked at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.

Both writers will read from their works and answer questions at tonight’s event. For more information contact Amber Flora Thomas, director of the Writers Series program at ffaft@uaf.edu or 474-6455.