Exeter, NH (October 10, 2007)—On Wednesday, October 24, at 7:30 p.m., Phillips Exeter Academy’s Class of 1945 Library will host a reading by poet Dave Smith. Smith is the Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry and Chair of the Department of Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He will be the first Lamont Poet in the Library’s Lamont Poetry Program for 2007–08. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the Assembly Hall, located on the second floor of the Academy Building on Front Street.

Smith primarily teaches in the area of contemporary poetry in the English language. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including his most recent work, Little Boats, Unsalvaged (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) and his 14th collection of poetry, The Wick of Memory, New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

Smith has also published works of criticism, fiction and collections of short stories and essays, including Hunting Men: A Life in the Life of Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

Currently, he serves as editor of the Southern Messenger Signature Poets Series of Louisiana State University, and for many years worked as co-editor of The Southern Review. Smith edited The Essential Poe (Ecco, 1991), The William Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (William Morrow and Co., 1985), and The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright (University of Illinois Press, 1981). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Fellowship; as well as the Virginia Prize in Poetry, and an award in poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Smith is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Smith has previously taught at the University of Utah; the State University of New York at Binghamton; the Summer Creative Writing Program at Bennington College in Vermont; the University of Florida; Virginia Commonwealth University; and Louisiana State University.

The Library’s Lamont Poetry Series is supported by the Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont ’20. Two poets are invited each year to read their poetry and attend English classes. Each visiting poet is photographed and asked to present the library with a manuscript poem, which is framed and hung on the fourth floor of the library. The collection of framed manuscript poems includes the works of such noted poets as Jorge Luis Borges, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joseph Brodsky and Allen Ginsberg. The series continues to bring remarkable poets to Exeter and remains a testimony to Mr. Lamont, who died in 1995.

For more information, please call Academy Librarian Jacquelyn H. Thomas at (603) 777-3328. For directions to Phillips Exeter Academy, call (603) 777-4330. For more information on other events, contact the Phillips Exeter Academy public events line at (603) 777-4309, or the Academy Library’s events page at http://www.exeter.edu/libraries/4513_4521.aspx or the Academy website at http://www.exeter.edu/.

Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 45 states, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and 23 foreign countries.