Gina Franco Inaugurates Writers-on-the-Shore Spring 2006

SALISBURY, MD---Poet Gina Franco inaugurates Salisbury University’s spring Writers-on-the-Shore series with a reading and discussion of her work 8 p.m. Wednesday, February 22, in the Montgomery Room of the Commons.

The author of the critically acclaimed The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press, 2004), Franco has earned the Academy of American Poets Prize from Smith College and the Robert Chasen and Corson-Bishop poetry prizes from Cornell University. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse and Prairie Schooner, among others.

Storm focuses on the life and travels of Kathryn, an 88-year-old Latino woman who is losing her memories—a storm of mental keepsakes—and the roots, uncertainty and cultural alienation they represent.

Veteran poet Ray Gonzalez calls Storm “a book that rings with power and sings with amazing writing… a knockout.” Author Alice Fulton says, “Franco does the impossible thing that lyric poets set out to do: She retrieves the storm of being in its unsettling breadth, the world’s devouring, the thou-art-that of transformation: hunger, love, death.” Sponsored by the English Department, Franco’s reading is free and the public is invited. For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU Web site at www.salisbury.edu. "