Peter Meinke, poet and author, and a 1955 graduate of Hamilton College, will give a reading of his work tonight, March 29, at 8 p.m. in Dwight Lounge, Bristol Campus Center at Hamilton. The reading is free and open to the public. Meinke's visit is sponsored by Hamilton's English department.
Meinke has written 11 collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Zinc Fingers (2000), Scars (1996) and Liquid Paper (1991).
Meinke's collection of short fiction, The Piano Tuner, won the Flannery O'Connor Award in 1986 and has been reissued in paperback. Meinke is also the author of two books of children's verse, Very Seldom Animal, and The Legend of Larry the Lizard. He has won numerous prizes for his poetry, three of them from the Poetry Society of America, including the Emily Dickinson Award in 1992. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Yankee, and many other magazines. He has served as writer-in-residence at Hamline University, Hamilton College, George Washington University, and Emory University, and was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Warsaw in Poland, 1978-79. His book on the writing of poetry, The Shape of Poetry, was published in 1999. Meinke served as director of the Writing Workshop at Eckerd College until his retirement in 1993.
