Penn State professor of English and women's studies Robin Becker will be giving a poetry reading on Thursday at 8 p.m. in the HUB Auditorium. The reading is part of the Allegheny Mountains Reading series and is sponsored by the Rolling Fund and the Master of Fine Arts Program in the Department of English.

Becker will be reading poems from the three most recent of her five published poetry collections, all published by University of Pittsburgh Press, and new poems from her sabbatical during the 2000-2001 academic year while she was the William Steeple-Davis Artist-in-Residence.

Her most recent poetry collection, The Horse Fair, was published in 2000. The book takes its title from a painting by 19th-century French painter Rosa Bonheur that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the themes of the poetry according to Becker is "the lives and works of visual artists and how artists fit into the social and cultural milieu of their times." Other recurring themes in the work are women's lives, friendships, family lives, and animals both domestic and wild.

The other poetry collections that Becker will be reading from are 1996's All-American Girl and 1990's Giacometti's Dog.

All-American Girl investigates the notion of what it is to be both all-American and a girl with all three words having multiple meanings. The collection won Becker the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry.

Giacometti's Dog was inspired by a sculpture that Becker saw in France by Alberto Giacometti of a small dog. She says she found the sculpture "riveting." The poems in the collection investigate what it means to be a U.S. citizen in contemporary U.S.A.

Becker has received multiple fellowships including fellowships from The Bunting Institute at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York in 1998.

She joined the Department of English at Penn State in 1994 and became a full professor in 2001. In 2000 she received the Atherton Teaching Award, which she was "extremely honored and pleased to win." The award is university-level with professors nominated by department and then put forward by college.

Aside from poetry Becker also writes book reviews and essays. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Boston Globe, The Boston Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the Poetry Editor for The Women's Review of Books.

The reading will be followed by a reception. Books will be for sale and Becker will be available for book signing.