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Poet Naomi Ayala to Present April 21

PLATTSBURGH, NY __ The English Department at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, in collaboration with the North Country Institute for Writers of Color and the Winkle Humanities Fund, will host a poetry reading by Naomi Ayala on Thursday, April 21 at 7 p.m. in the Plattsburgh Room, Angell College Center. This event is free and open to the public.

A native of Puerto Rico, Ayala has worked as an art and education administrator, a coordinator of science programs and is currently an education consultant, freelance writer and teacher. She founded Punto Vivo, a program that brings literary programming and educational resources to that neighborhood community in Washington, D.C.

Ayala was the winner of a 2003 individual Artist Fellowship from the District of Columbia's Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2001, she was awarded that agency's Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry.

Ayala is the author of Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press, 1997), a book of poetry that was selected by the New York City Public Library as one of 1999's Book for the Teen Age.

Her poetry has also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Callaloo , The Village Voice , The Caribbean Writer , The Massachusetts Review , Hanging Loose and Terra Incognita among others.

During a more than 1,000-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail in the spring of 2000, Ayala walked from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Wingdale, N.Y. She values the outdoors and celebrates the sacred connection between the individual and the earth. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry and a translation of Gioconda Belli's next book of poems scheduled for publication by Curbstone Press in 2005.

For further information about this event, please contact the SUNY Plattsburgh English Department at 518-564-2134.

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