Randolph Michael S. Harper, Julie Whitaker, and Joe Weil will all be reading at County College of Morris Library on Wednesday, April 25, at 7 p.m. Admission is free and a reception and book signing will follow the program. Distinguished University Professor at Brown University and Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, Michael S. Harper is author of nine books of poetry, including Songlines in Michaeltree, Honorable Amendments, and Nightmare Begins Responsibility. He also edited, with Anthony Walton, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry. A National Book Award nominee, he has received awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Julie Whitaker, daughter-in-law of Byram, New Jersey poet-philosopher Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993), will read from Late Poems of Kenneth Burke, a collection of Burke’s poems which she edited with David Blakesley (University of South Carolina Press, 2005). Kenneth Burke’s Collected Poems 1917-1967 was published by the University of California Press in 1968. The poems in the new volume were written by Burke between 1968 and his death in 1993. Ms. Whitaker teaches literature and writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York. She is married to sculptor Michael Burke. New Jersey poet Joe Weil teaches in the graduate creative writing program at SUNY-Binghamton. He is the author of six books of poetry, including Ode to Elizabeth and Other Poems, In Praise We Enter, A Portable Winter, and The Pursuit of Happiness. In his introduction to A Portable Winter, Harvey Pekar writes “I like Joe’s precision of language, his insights: I need a place where poets aren’t expected / I would go nuts in a town where everyone read Pound . . . . I don’t think Manhattan needs another poet / I don’t think Maine could use me . . . . Where nothing is sacred, everything is sacred / Where no one writes, the air seems strangely / charged with metaphor’ (“Ode to Elizabeth”). National Poetry Month was established as a nationwide celebration of poetry 10 years ago by the Academy of American Poets in New York (www. poets.org). The reading is sponsored by the English and Philosophy Department, the Liberal Arts Division, and the Office of the President.