Elizabeth Bradfield, naturalist and award-winning poet, to read at Bates College

As part of Bates College’s Language Arts Live series of literary readings, poet Elizabeth Bradfield will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.The event is open to the public at no cost. Language Arts Live is sponsored by the Bates English department, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information about Bradfield’s reading or the Language Arts Live series, please contact this eosucha@bates.edu.

Bradfield is a visual artist, Web designer, naturalist and poet. Her poetry focuses on both the self and the greater natural world. It “turns a critical, loving eye on her own nature as a lesbian, as well as on the queer world of nature, which she interprets as a professional naturalist hired to show people what to see in what they see,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote.

The author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008) and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2009), Bradfield has received fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Program, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Interpretive Work won the 2009 Audre Lorde Award in Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, celebrating lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender literature.

Bradfield is the founder and manager of Broadsided Press, an online collaborative press that publishes monthly visual and literary collaborations as Adobe Acrobat files that are downloaded and shared around the world.

Bradfield has a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she lived for five years. She now lives on Cape Cod.