On Wednesday, November 13, National Book Award-winning poet David Ferry and critically acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid will read from their works as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series of the Program in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Princeton student Patience Haggin will also read from her recent translation work. The reading begins at 4:30 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Theatre Center and will be followed by a reception and book signing. The event is free and open to the public.

David Ferry is an acclaimed American poet and translator. His most recent book Bewilderment (2012) received the National Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Previously, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999) won the American Academy of Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review. Ferry’s other awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. Ferry has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, and in 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College.

Ferry will be introduced by poet Susan Wheeler, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award in Poetry and Professor and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua and migrated to New York at seventeen, where she eventually became a staff writer for The New Yorker. She has published numerous books, among them At the Bottom of the River (1983), a collection of short stories that was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; A Small Place (1988), and the recently published novel, See Now Then (2013). Kincaid is the recipient of several awards, including the Center for Fiction’s Clifton Fadiman Medal, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the Anifield-Wolf Book Award. In 2004, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kincaid is the Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Kincaid will be introduced by Jennifer Gilmore, author of two New York Times Notable books and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center.