LEWISTON — Gregory Pardlo, a poet whose prize-winning debut collection “Totem” explores what it means to shoulder the weight of cultural, racial and literary expectations, will open Bates College’s 2011-12 Language Arts Live reading series.

The session will begin at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Open to the public at no cost, the literary reading series will continue with appearances by Laura van den Berg, whose short-story collection was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection (Oct. 13); and veteran poet Sydney Lea (Nov. 17).

Pardlo’s book “just grew on me,” said Language Arts Live coordinator Robert Farnsworth, himself a poet and a senior lecturer in English at Bates who chose “Totem” as required reading for an advanced poetry course in 2010.

Pardlo’s work “is never self-regardingly cinematic, but offers undercurrents of wit and compact, emotionally informed thinking. It’s satisfying and challenging,” Farnsworth said.

In “Totem,” Pardlo’s obsession is the role of the New World writer and his relationship to history, marginalization and the politics of representation. How does one defy a tradition that he loves? Pardlo’s choice is to expand it, to take his cues from jazz musicians, those incorrigible reinventors and reshapers of meaning and expectation.

Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University, where as an undergraduate, he managed his grandfather’s small jazz club in nearby Pennsauken, N.J. He received a master’s in fine arts from New York University as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry in 2001.

Pardlo is poetry book review editor of Callaloo, a literary and cultural journal of the African diaspora, and is assistant professor of creative writing at George Washington University. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn.

Van den Berg’s short stories depict women consumed with searching for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.

She has taught writing at Emerson College and Gettysburg College, among other institutions. She lives in Baltimore and is at work on new stories and a novel.

For more information, call 786-6256 or 784-0416, or email [email protected].