UT’s Writers at the University Closes Season with Two Award-Winning Poets April 19

On Tuesday, April 19, The University of Tampa will wrap up its 2015-2016 Writers at the University series with readings by two award-winning poets, Helen Pruitt Wallace and Syvia Curbelo. The event begins at 7 p.m. in the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery on campus and is free and open to the public.

Wallace has served as poet laureate of St. Petersburg since January. Her first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House, won the Richard Snyder Prize for Poetry and a bronze Florida Book Award. She served as co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers, published by Anhinga Press, and individual poems have been published in multiple journals and anthologies. She received the McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewannee Writer’s Conference.

Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her collection Falling Landscape was published by Anhinga Press in 2015, and she is the author of three other poetry collections, The Secret History of Water, The Geography of Leaving and Ambush. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review.

Writers at the University is a literary reading series organized by the Department of English and Writing. Each year, the series invites renowned and emerging literary talents — poets and prose writers — to the University for readings, class visits, book signings and Q-and-A sessions. The series is funded in part by the Mandt Endowment and private donations.

For more information, contact Lynne Bartis at lbartis@ut.edu.