Tuesday, November 06, 2001

WILMINGTON, N.C. - Poet Timothy Liu will read from his works at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 13, in the King Hall Auditorium at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. This free, public reading is sponsored by the university’s Creative Writing Department. A reception and book signing will follow.

Liu, a distinguished visiting professor in UNCW’s Creative Writing Department, is the author of four books of poems including Hard Evidence published this year. His first collection of poetry Vox Angelica won the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. In addition to receiving a PEN Open Book Citation in 2000 and a special mention for the Pushcart Prize in 1999, Liu is a two-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

According to Poetry magazine, Liu’s poetry is a “daring, sensitive, impassioned body of work that deftly struggles to balance the internal, sensitive, solitary world of the poet against the external struggle of an Asian, Mormon, gay man with everyday living. Liu’s range of subject matter is wide and contemporary, sometimes sexually frank, often meditative, always emotionally candid.”

Liu’s poems and reviews have been published in the journals The Antioch Review, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, River Styx and TriQuarterly. He is also the editor of two books Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry and Take Out: Queer Asian American Writing.

“I went from being a priest in the Mormon Church to what Wallace Stevens would call ‘a priest of the invisible,’ but the Biblical imagination remains a strong force in the way I perceive the world,” said Liu.

Liu, whose parents are from the Chinese mainland, grew up in San Jose, Calif. He studied at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Houston and Brigham Young University. An assistant professor of English at William Paterson University, Liu lives in Hoboken, N.J. During his two-month stay as a distinguished visiting professor, Liu is teaching a poetry workshop in UNCW’s Master of Fine Arts Program.

For more information, contact the Creative Writing Department at 910/962-7063



Timothy Liu

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