Beat Poet Janine Pommy Vega Performs at RIT, March 29

Beat poet Janine Pommy Vega will give a free reading at Rochester Institute of Technology on Tuesday, March 29. The reading will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Liberal Arts Building, room A205.

Vega is included in Brenda Knight’s anthology, Women of the Beat Generation, and is a veteran of the Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1960s. In recent decades, Vega has worked extensively in poetry workshops with prison inmates and migrant workers. She has published 18 books of poetry and non-fiction writing, including Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and Selected Poems and Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents, a memoir about hiking the Himalayas, Andes and Amazon. Vega’s latest book, The Green Piano, will be available for purchase and signing after the reading.

The event is funded in part by Poets & Writers Inc., through a grant from the New York state Council on the Arts, and by RIT’s Department of Language and Literature, Signatures Magazine and an interactive learning grant from RIT’s Office of the Provost.

Vega will also give a second reading with RIT poet John Roche, assistant professor of language and literature, and Dave Kelly, professor of English at State University of New York at Geneseo, at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 4, at Writers & Books.

For more information, contact John Roche at jfrgla@rit.edu.