FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bates to host Eighth Annual Writers Harvest

LEWISTON, Maine -- Poet Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award for "This Time: New and Selected Poems" (1999), will read from his work during the Eighth Annual Writers Harvest Author Reading at Bates College at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, in Chase Hall Lounge on Campus Avenue. The public is invited to attend and donations will be accepted. In Maine, proceeds will benefit the Maine Coalition for Food Security as part of the Writers Harvest program, the national annual literary benefit to fight hunger and poverty sponsored by Share Our Strength (SOS).

Stern, author of nine collections of poetry, has won many awards including a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Lamont Poetry Prize and grants from the Guggenheim National Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Sharing with a John Ashbery poem, his long poem "Hot Dog" (from "Odd Mercy") received the award for the best poem from the "American Poetry Review" in 1996. A Pittsburgh native, Stern has taught at a number of universities. For 13 years, he was on the faculty of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Each fall, Writers Harvest brings together more than 2,000 writers to fight hunger and poverty by reading from their works in more than 600 bookstores, college campuses and community centers around the country. SOS distributes 100 percent of event donations to statewide anti-hunger and anti-poverty efforts. SOS works to alleviate and prevent hunger and poverty in the United States and around the world. Since its founding in 1984, SOS has distributed more than $55 million to 1,000 organizations working to prevent the causes and consequences of hunger and poverty in the United States and abroad.