Todd Davis and David L. James

The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature Todd Davis and David L. James on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 7 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium in the Martha Miller Center for the Eighth Annual Tom Andrews Memorial Reading.

The two authors will also participate in a question-and-answer session earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m., also in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium.

The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.

Todd Davis is the author of three full-length collections of poetry -- “The Least of These,” “Some Heaven,” and “Ripe”—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, “Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems.” He edited the nonfiction collection “Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,” and co-edited “Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets.”

His poetry has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac” and by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry.”  His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in such journals and magazines as “Poetry Daily,” “Iowa Review,” “The North American Review,” “Indiana Review,” “Gettysburg Review,” “Shenandoah,” “Image,” “Ecotone,” “Orion,” “West Branch,” “River Styx,” “Quarterly West,” “Green Mountains Review,” “Sou’wester” and “Poetry East.” He teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College.

David L. James teaches at Oakland Community College. His books include “A Heart Out of This World” (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984) and “She Dances Like Mussolini” (March Street Press, 2009), which won the 2010 next Generation Indi book award for poetry. He has also published multiple chapbooks, including: “Do Not Give Dogs What is Holy,” “I Dance Back,” “I will Peel This Mask Off,” and “Trembling in Someone’s Palm.” More than 30 of his one-act plays have been produced from New York City to California, and his essays have been published in “Community College Enterprise,” “Rattle,” “College Teaching,” “Adult Learning,” and many other journals.

Every year one reading in the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is done in honor of Tom Andrews (1961-2001), a 1984 Hope graduate who was born and grew up in West Virginia. Following Hope, he earned his M.F.A. at the University of Virginia. In his lifetime, Andrews published three books of poems and a memoir, “Codeine Diary,” about his coming to terms with his hemophilia and his determined refusal to let it circumscribe his life. He also edited two collections of essays, “The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright” and “On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things.” In 2002, Oberlin College Press published “Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews,” a posthumous volume comprised of two previously published books of poetry, “The Brother’s Country” and “The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle,” and other works.

Additional information about the series is available online at jrvws.org.

The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave, at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.