Poet Allison Joseph Inaugurates Reading Series

"I like to say that I didn't choose to be a poet - it chose me. I have always been in love with words, their power to move and console and change people's minds and feelings."

Allison Joseph is the author of three collections of poetry, What Keeps Us Here, Soul Train, and In Every Seam. Her poems are often attuned to the experiences of women and minorities. What Keeps Us Here was the winner of Ampersand Press' 1992 Women Poets Series Competition. It also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and Emerson College in Boston. In addition, she was awarded the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry in1996 and the Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 1997. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Parnassus, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. Allison holds degrees from Kenyon College and from Indiana University. She recently won first place in the year 2000 poetry contest sponsored by So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, published at George Mason University. Currently she is an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Spring 2001 inaugurated the Campus Reading Series by hosting Joseph.