EUGENE–Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award, will read on Wednesday, April 5, at the University of Oregon as part of the UO Program in Creative Writing Reading Series.

His reading, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 8 p.m. in the Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall, 1468 University St.

The author of 14 books of poetry, including "Country Music," "Chickamauga," "Black Zodiac" and "Appalachia," Wright holds the Souder Family Chair at the University of Virginia. His poetry also has been recognized with the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

"No other American poet has so successfully discovered a personal voice while scrupulously avoiding narcissism," the Yale Review said of Wright’s poetry.

"I think poems should come out of one’s body–and life–the way webbing comes out of a spider," Wright once said of his own writing process. "I also think they should be as personally impersonal as a spider’s web.

"We should stake our art on the persistence of continuous inspection," he continued. "We should have a tenderness toward the mundane, a gathering to us of the quotidian. By concentrating on things that are, we can put meaning where it should be–in the picture itself, in reconstruction of the world as it is when we look at it."

"Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems," Wright’s most recent book, will be available during the reading at the University of Oregon Bookstore table.

For more information, call the UO Creative Writing Program, (541) 346-0544.

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