Their words shine and sing, sting and sensitize, awake and intoxicate, tickle and trouble us, but one thing is certain: the writings of the women of the Virginia Tech English faculty never leave us untouched.

Five of these award-winning writers will share their words with the public Monday, March 31, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. in the Donaldson Brown Hotel & Conference Center (DBH&CC) auditorium. Their readings, a part of Women's Month celebration, are open to the public at no charge. Nikki Giovanni, Lisa Norris, Simone Poirier-Bures, Katherine Soniat, and Gyorgyi Voros will present a variety of poetry, fiction, and essays, followed by a question-and-answer period and a time to autograph books or just meet the authors.

Nikki Giovanni has been called "a national treasure." New York threw a celebration for her 30th year as a beloved poet. She was named the first Rosa Parks Woman of Courage "for her words, vision, courage, voice, her artistry, commitment to change, inspiration to others, and her distinguished career as a writer, teacher, and leader." She has twice received the Image Award from the NAACP and also won the Lanston Hughes Award. The poems in her most recent book, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, range from an exaltation of "the might and grace of women to a commemoration of Africa and Giovanni's family legacy," according to publisher William Morrow. After 30 years, she still writes about racial issues, war, and other human struggles. "The world may be a bit more high-tech and faster paced," she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently, "but the conflicts remain pretty much the same."

Lisa Norris also "lays out a clear, compelling version of the way we live right here and now," wrote Al Young, the judge who awarded Norris's book, Toy Guns, the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. "All 10 stories in this disturbing collection revolve around Americans' passionate devotion to guns, gun-toting, sexually tinged violence, and the womanly pursuit of power and dignity," Young said. "…These characters-and characters they are, most of them women, some of them girls-walk tightropes. They move through shadows and the dimly lit edges of love, family, marriage, and other at-risk relationships." Norris has taught creative writing at various universities in Idaho, Oregon, Minnesota, and Virginia.

Simone Poirier-Bures also is "a connoisseur of the richly human," according to George Elliott Clarke, a book critic for the Halifax Chronicle Herald and one of Canada's best writers. She is the author of Candyman, a novel set in her native Nova Scotia, That Shining Place, an award-winning memoir of Crete, and Nicole, short stories and memoir about growing up female and Acadian. "Simone Poirier-Bures bares a young woman's heart," Clarke wrote about Nicole. "She feels her way into the tang and brine and sweetness of growing up female and Acadian in Halifax…. Her fiction is delicately tender." Her essays and stories have been published in 10 anthologies, and a dozen of her short nature essays were broadcast on WVTF public radio.

Katherine Soniat is "a voice that brings together many skeins of America's heritage, and a poet who, like Whitman, can sing, in her own voice, of a teeming nation of nations," wrote Mary A. McCay in the New Orleans Times Picayune. Soniat's most recent work, The Fire Setters, is available through the Web del Sol/The Literary Review Online Chapbook Series at theliteraryreview.org or webdelsol.com. Her collection Alluvial was published by Bucknell University Press and A Shared Life won the Iowa Prize from the University of Iowa Press.

Gyorgyi Voros, a member of the creative writing faculty, is both scholar and poet. She is the author of Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, a book that poet John Ashberry calls "a dazzling, multi-tiered account of the poetry" and that Lawrence Buell, chair of Harvard's English Department, calls "incisive, ambitious, original, timely." Voros has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Last year, she received a Carnegie Hall Lyric Recovery Festival Poetry Prize.Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Boulevard, Parnassus and Shenandoah, and recent work is forthcoming in Artemis and Hotel Amerika. Most of her work addresses those edges and ecotones where nature and culture meet and inform each other.

No pre-registration is required to attend the reading. For further information, call Sally Harris at (540)231-6759.

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