LEWISTON — Jaed Coffin, a Brunswick author whose first book chronicles his experience as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s native village in Thailand, opens the Language Arts Live series at Bates College with a reading at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-6256.

All Language Arts Live readings this autumn take place at 6:30 p.m. in the Muskie Archives. The series returns with award-winning poet Peter Gizzi on Monday, Oct. 14, and with Maine poets Lee Sharkey and Carl Little on Wednesday, Nov. 20.

Coffin, Boston Globe critic James Sullivan wrote in 2008, “has been preparing for a writing career for years. Like his hero Ernest Hemingway, he has traveled the globe in search of experiences — sea kayaking from Seattle to Alaska, backpacking around Mexico, and, yes, spending several months at the bullfights in Spain.”

Coffin’s first book is “A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants,” which recounts his time in Thailand. Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and in a cover story in the Globe, “A Chant” is now taught in the multicultural curriculum at colleges and universities including Brown, St. Michael’s, Middlebury and University of Maine, Farmington.

Coffin was honored as a resident fellow at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, where he researched his forthcoming novel, “Roughhouse Friday,” based on his career as the middleweight champion of an Alaskan barroom boxing circuit.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Middlebury College and a master’s in fiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program, where he is now a member of the faculty.