Sholl, who teaches at the University of Southern Maine and Vermont College, has published five collections of poetry, including her most recent volume, Don’t Explain (1997), selected as the winner of the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her collection The Red Line (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) won the 1991 Associated Writing Programs Award for Poetry. Sholl’s other books include Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter and Rooms Overhead.

Sholl’s reading is part of a series of poetry readings sponsored by the English department at Bates. The next reading will feature poet Sonia Sanchez in the Seventh Annual Writer’s Harvest Reading Thursday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. in Chase Hall Lounge.

Tagliabue has published six collections of poetry, most recently New and Selected Poems: 1942-1997 (National Poetry Foundation, 1998). Born in Cantu, Italy, and raised in North Bergen, N.J., from the age of four, he has been a Fulbright professor in Pisa, Tokyo, Shanghai and Jakarta. Tagliabue received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University, studying during the 1940s with Allen Ginsburg and John Kerouac. The author of 12 puppet plays for children and the recipient of Karolyi and Rockefeller Foundation grants for writing, Tagliabue arrived at Bates in 1953 and retired from the faculty in 1989. Recently, he and his wife, Grace, moved from Lewiston to Providence, R.I. Poet Amy Clampitt wrote of his work, “John Tagliabue writes out of a deeply sacramental sense of nature and history. He is, moreover, that rare person to whom poetry appears to come as naturally as breathing.”

Tagliabue’s reading is part of a series of poetry readings sponsored by the English department at Bates. The next reading will feature Portland poet Betsy Sholl reading from her work Oct. 14.

Pinsky, currently a professor of graduate writing at Boston University, recently propelled Dante onto the bestseller lists with his 1994 verse translation of the Inferno, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He is the author of three prose books, Landor’s Poetry, The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World, and his book History of My Heart won the William Carlos Williams Prize. In 1997 he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize by the Academy of American Poets. In the fall of 1998, he will publish two new books: A Brief Guide to Sounds of Poetry in English and Handbook of Heartbreak.

The author of an interactive computer “text adventure” loosely modeled on Dante’s Inferno, Pinsky believes poetry and computers share two key attributes — speed and memory.

“They share the great human myth of trope, an image that could be called the secret passage: the discovery of large, manifold channels through a small ordinary looking or all but invisible aperture,” wrote Pinsky, who is poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.