Poet Cyrus Cassells to give reading Dec. 6

The Skidmore Department of English will host a reading by poet Cyrus Cassells at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6, in the Surrey Williamson Inn. Admission is free and open to the public.

Born in 1957 in Dover, Del., Cassells received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1979 and currently resides in San Francisco.

The author of Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which won the Lambda Literary Award, Cassells also wrote Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (1994), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award, and The Mud Actor (1982), which was a National Poetry Series selection.

Cassells is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher. Cassells lives in San Francisco.

In a 1998 article titled ?A Dozen Who Make a Difference? published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cassells shared the following thoughts about his work: ?My poetry isn't related to race or ethnicity so much as it is to my spiritual journey. I studied Spanish from age 12, minored in Japanese literature at Stanford and lived in Italy for six years. I've begun to think of myself as a kind of ambassador -- connecting African American experience to world experience.''