The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poets Mary Ann Samyn and Anele Rubin on Tuesday, March 13, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre.

The public is invited. Admission is free.

Samyn's poems have won many awards and been published widely in the nation's best-known literary journals. She is the author of four collections of poetry, the latest of which, "Purr," Lyn Emanuel has called "a dazzling collection" of "poetry that is hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new." Her other books are all award winners. "Rooms by the Sea" won the 1994 Kent State UP/Wick Chapbook Prize; "Captivity Narrative" won the 1999 Ohio State UP/The Journal Prize; and "Inside the Yellow Dress" was a 2001 New Issues Press/Green Rose Selection. Samyn has read and conducted writing workshops at dozens of colleges and universities across the country. She is the founder and director of Oakland University's Far Field Retreat for Writers, now in its sixth year. She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University.

Rubin's first book, "Trying to Speak," won the 2004 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and this year's Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writer Award for poetry. In his foreword to the book, poet Philip Levine calls the movement in Rubin's poems "artful, subtle, and modest," and admires her talent for "encountering the world and capturing the extraordinary in the everyday in language that seems so common and casual we tend to despise it rather than embrace it for what it is, the hallmark of the greatest poetry." Rubin has been an adjunct professor in the English department at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University since 1988.

Live music by the Hope College Jazz Ensemble will precede the reading beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Additional information may be obtained online by visiting www.hope.edu/vws.

The Knickerbocker Theatre is located in downtown Holland at 86 E. Eighth St.