On Thursday 9 March at 5 p.m. American poet Ron Smith will read a selection of his published and new poems, including works inspired by John Keats. 

Ron Smith is the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is the author of the books Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, Its Ghostly Workshop, Moon Road: Poems 1986-2005, and the forthcoming volume The Humility of the Brutes. 

Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery was judged by Margaret Atwood 'a close runner-up' for the National Poetry Series Open Competition and was subsequently published by University Presses of Florida. Ron Smith’s work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Kansas Quarterly, Blackbird, Puerto del Sol, and Plume. His poems have also appeared in a number of anthologies published in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Italy. 

In 2005 Smith was an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize; in 2006 he became one of the Curators for that prize. He's the recipient of Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize (judge, Linda Pastan), Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Prize, and many other awards. He is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School, where he holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching. 

Smith holds degrees in Philosophy, English, General Humanities, and Creative Writing from University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University (B.A., M.A., M.H. M.F.A.) and has studied British drama at Oxford University, writing at Bennington College, and Renaissance and Modernist culture at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Merano, Italy. 

Ron Smith grew up Savannah, Georgia. He attended college on a football scholarship, playing for the Tangerine Bowl Championship University of Richmond Spiders, the first-ever “Team of Distinction” to be inducted into the Spider Sports Hall of Fame. Since 2009, he has been Poetry Editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature.

Advance booking is recommended but not essential.