FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington invites the public to join them in celebrating Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair’s recent winning of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Poetry.

A reception and reading will be held at 6 p.m., Friday, June 19, in the Emery Community Arts Center on the UMF campus. The event is free and open to the public.

The festivity, “Blood and Memory–A Celebration of Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair and the PEN New England Award,” will include an opening reception to be followed by readings of McNair’s work featuring UMF faculty members Kristen Case, Shana Youngdahl, Daniel Gunn, Jeffrey Thomson, Professor Emeritus McNair and a solo piano piece by Philip Carlsen.

PEN is a global organization to celebrate literature, and this is one of the major national awards for a book of poems. McNair recently received the distinguished award in a ceremony at the Kennedy Library in Boston. The award was given for McNair’s new collection of poetry, “The Lost Child; Ozark Poems.”

The citation read at the ceremony spoke of The Lost Child’s “masterful syntax” and “cunning humor,” concluding that it “harnesses the timeless power of the epic poem to tell necessary stories of our human tribe.” The citation added, “The colloquial music of these poems will move readers to laughter and tears.”

McNair, Maine Poet Laureate and University of Maine at Farmington professor emeritus and writer in residence, is regarded by U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine as, “one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” McNair was appointed to a five-year term as Maine Poet Laureate in 2011 by Maine Governor LePage.

McNair is the author of twenty books, including ten volumes of poetry, three books of nonfiction and several edited anthologies. His most recent books are “The Lost Child: Ozark Poems” (Godine, 2014), “The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry” (CMU, 2012) and “Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems” (Godine, 2010).

The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Emmy Award.