Poetry Readings Take Place March 21 and April 18 at Museum

Julie Kane's poetry collections include Jazz Funeral (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize) and Rhythm & Booze (winner of the National Poetry Series and finalist for the Poets' Prize), Body and Soul, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, London Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, as well as in several anthologies. A former George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Orleans Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University, and Fulbright Scholar at Vilnius Pedagogical University in Lithuania, she teaches at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

Ashley Mace Havird's collection Dirt Eaters, selected for publication in the USC South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Series, appeared in November 2009. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, The Chattahoochee Review, and Southern Humanities Review. A recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Literature as well as Shreveport Regional Arts Council Fellowships, Havird has taught at Centenary College of Louisiana, the University of Virginia's Division of Continuing Education, and the Renzi Education and Art Center in Shreveport.

Dorie LaRue holds a PhD from the University of Louisiana and teaches at LSU-Shreveport. Her debut novel, Resurrecting Virgil (The Backwaters Press), won the Omaha Prize for Fiction in 2000. Her poetry collections include The Private Frenzy (University of Nebraska Press) and Seeking the Monsters (New Spirit Press). She is a recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship, a Shreveport Regional Arts Council Fellowship, and four grants from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. LaRue's work has appeared in many journals including The Southern Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review.

David Havird earned his PhD at the University of Virginia and has been a member of the English faculty at Centenary College of Louisiana since 1988. Here he originated the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, whose inaugural recipient was Eudora Welty in 1991. The author of articles on such Southern authors as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Elizabeth Spencer, and Allen Tate, Havird has also published poems in such periodicals as Agni, The New Yorker, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, and the Yale Review and online at Poetry Daily. His collection, Penelope's Design (Texas Review Press), was the 2009 winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.