February 3, 1999		Award-Winning Poet Lynn Powell to Give Reading at Oberlin College in February Media Contact: Marci Janas
	Tuesday, Feb. 23 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 at (440) 775-6567		OBERLIN, OH-- Award-winning poet Lynn Powell, an Oberlin resident, will present an evening of old and new poems when she appears at Oberlin College later this month. Powell will read poems from her collection Old & New Testaments as well as new work from a book currently in progress. Old & New Testaments won the 1995 Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press and the 1996 New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association. The Co-op Bookstore will have copies of Powell's book available for purchase immediately following the reading. The poet Carolyn Kizer, who selected Powell's work for the Brittingham Prize, has commented on the "radiance and clarity" that suffuses Powell's poetry. Alicia Ostriker writes that Powell's poems are "playful, tender and wise, [she] brings her gospel learning down to earth." Powell's poems have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and are forthcoming in Seneca Review, DoubleTake, and other journals. She has received Individual Artist Fellowships from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Powell has worked extensively as a Writer-in-the-Schools for the Tennessee Arts Commission, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. She has taught as Visiting Writer in the English Department of Cornell University. She grew up in East Tennessee and was educated at Carson-Newman College and Cornell, where she earned an M.F.A. in 1980. Powell lives in Oberlin with her husband Dan Stinebring, a professor in the physics department at Oberlin College, and their two children, Anna Claire and Jesse. Oberlin's Creative Writing Program, English Department and Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences are sponsors of Powell's reading.