The Downtown Denver Campus is hosting a series of readings by Major Jackson, author of Leaving Saturn, (University of Georgia Press, 2001) winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. On Thursday, Feb. 24^, Jackson will give a talk on "The Ballad in Hip-Hop Music" at 1 p.m. and then read from his original poetry at 4 p.m. Both events will be held in St. Cajetan's Church.

These events are jointly sponsored by the Department of English and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the UC Denver Live! program, the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities and its program the Colorado Center for the Book.

On Friday, Feb. 25, Jackson will be at Book Buffs, 1519 S. Pearl Street, for a short reading and reception to celebrate the publication of a broadside edition of his poem, "How to Listen."

Jackson is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf  Writers' Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, as well as a commission from  Philadelphia's Concerto Soloists.

In 2003, Jackson received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. He was a 2003-2004 Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow and a finalist for the 2002 National Book Critic's Circle Award in Poetry. His poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road and other literary journals.

Jackson is a graduate of Temple University and University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. He is an associate professor of English at University of Vermont, a faculty member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

His second book of poems, Hoops, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton this year.

This information is posted at www.denverpoetry.org. For more information, contact Jake Adam York  at 303-556-8828 or Jake.York@cudenver.edu.