February 24, 1999		John Loomis, Winner of Field Poetry Prize, To Read at Oberlin College Media Contact: Marci Janas
	Tuesday, March 9 8 p.m. King Building Room 106 (corner of N. Professor and W. College streets) Free public event For more information please call the Oberlin College Creative Writing Program (440) 775-6567		OBERLIN, OH--Jon Loomis's poetry has won praise from many critics for its clarity and intensity. His first collection, Vanitas Motel, won publication by Oberlin College Press and its 1997 Field Poetry Prize. And Loomis won this pronouncement from David Young, Longman Chair of English and the Humanities at Oberlin and an editor of Oberlin College Press: "Jon Loomis has arrived in our midst, fully formed as a poetic voice, and he will bear watching." Listeners can hear and see for themselves when Loomis reads from his poems at Oberlin College on March 9. "Vanitas Motel has more purpose and control than we usually encounter in first collections," says Young. His poems are "remarkably distilled, often ferociously understated or matter-of-fact about pain and loss." Poet Jean Valentine calls Loomis' work "grave, intelligent, mysterious . . . [it] takes you under your own skin, into your own soul." Loomis's poems have appeared in Field, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the Iowa Review and other journals. He has received grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. and from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Loomis, who grew up in Athens, Ohio, teaches poetry writing at the University of Florida. His reading is sponsored by Oberlin's Creative Writing Program and the Oberlin College Press.