FARMINGTON – Award-winning poet Ravi Shankar will be lunchtime reader Thursday, March 5, in the University of Maine at Farmington’s 2008-09 Visiting Writers Series. He will read from his work at noon in room C123 in the UMF Olsen Student Center. Admission is free.

A poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University, Shankar is the founding editor of “Drunken Boat,” an international online journal of the arts. “Instrumentality,” his first book, was published by Word Press in May 2004, and was a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards. He has also collaborated with Reb Livingston on the chapbook “Wanton Textiles,” selections of which appeared in Fringe Magazine and Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Shankar’s poetry and critical work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Fulcrum.

He currently serves on the advisory council for the Connecticut Center for the Book, has been a commentator on National Public Radio and British Broadcasting corporations; reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review; and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, edited “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond.”

Shankar has taught at Queens College, the University of New Haven and Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in poetry.

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