The Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the CSU Department of English will present a reading with Kimberly Johnson and Katy Lederer on Wednesday, November 19 at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Center’s Writers / Reading Series. The reading will be held in the Fenn Tower Theater (FT 102) at 1983 East 24th Street (at Euclid). The event is free and open to the public.

Earlier in the day, Lederer will discuss money and poetry on “Around Noon” with Dee Perry, after the noon news on WCPN, 90.3 FM, and Johnson will lecture on “Sex and God in Seventeenth-Century Poetry” at 3 p.m. in Rhodes Tower, room 503 in the University Library, located at 1860 East 22nd Street. The lecture is also free and open to the public.

Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry: Levinathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God. She is also a professor of Renaissance literature at Brigham Young University, and her translation of Virgil’s Georgics will be released by Penguin Classics in 2009. Her poems, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review and Translation. She received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex and more recently, The Heaven-Sent Leaf, which addresses that most taboo of subjects—money. Drawing on her experience as a “brainworker” at a hedge fund, the poems view life through the lens of expenditure—not just of money but of all that it signifies and they are ruthlessly critical of our current financial milieu. Her memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers, was named one of the eight Best Books of the Year by Esquire Magazine, and relates growing up as the younger sister of champion poker players Annie Duke and Howard Lederer.

A book signing with the authors will take place after the reading.

For more information, contact the Cleveland State University Poetry Center at 216.687.3986, the Department of English at 216.687.3951, or visit www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter.

# # #