RELEASED: October 1, 2009

By Abby Malik

DANVILLE, KY— Poet Davis McCombs will be reading at Centre College on Monday, Oct. 5 at 7 p.m. in the Vahlkamp Theatre located in Crounse Academic Center. The reading is free and open to the public.

"His reading is sure to be a crowd-pleaser, and his subject is of local interest," says Lisa Williams, NEH Associate Professor of English at Centre and former classmate of McCombs's at the University of Virginia.

McCombs won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first volume of poetry, Ultima Thule (selected by W.S. Merwin), and the Dorset Prize for Dismal Rock (selected by Linda Gregerson), which was published in 2007.

A Kentucky native, McCombs graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in poetry writing from the University of Virginia. He has been the recipient of a fellowship from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

He directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas.

McCombs was a summer park ranger at Mammoth Cave during college and graduate school, and many of the poems in Ultima Thule are about that landscape.

He also comes from a family of tobacco farmers (for 200 years they harvested tobacco) in Hart County, Kentucky, and he explores that heritage in a sequence called "Tobacco Mosaic" in Dismal Rock.

"They're both terrific books, highly engaging and widely praised," Williams says. "I've taught poems from both books here at Centre, and at the Kentucky Literature Academy this summer at the Carnegie Center, I introduced Kentucky educators to Davis' work."

Have comments, suggestions, or story ideas? E-mail leigh.ivey@centre.edu with your feedback.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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