LEWISTON, Maine -- Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis will read from his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25, in Chase Hall Lounge on Campus Avenue, Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Dennis won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for "Practical Gods" (Penguin USA 2001), his eighth collection of verse and one that seeks to explore ordinary life in terms of religious mythology both biblical and pagan.

The New York Times Book Review has praised Dennis for his "wise, original and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving."

A professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dennis has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lily Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. In announcing the award, Joseph Parisi, the editor of Poetry, called Dennis "a poet who has valuable things to say - about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, loneliness, life's regrets - the great What ifs and roads not taken - in ways that are personal and universal at the same time."