Stetson University will host a multi-media reading/performance on Thursday, March 15, featuring Stetson Poet Terri Witek and visual artist and former Stetson professor Cyriaco Lopes, who now teaches at the City University of New York’s John Jay College. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Rinker Auditorium inside the Lynn Business Center, 345 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand.

A reception will follow in Stetson’s Hand Art Center, where a retrospective of the collaborative work of Witek and Lopes, Uma Coisa Into Another, will be exhibited from Monday, March 12, through Friday, March 30. The show will feature video, photography, drawing and artists’ books on paper. The Hand Art Center is at 139 E. Michigan Ave.

Witek’s latest book of poetry, Exit Island (Orchises Press, 2012), features images by Lopes and has been praised by author Barbara Hamby as “a swirling microcosm of the tragic and playful, of betrayal and deep and abiding love.” Exit Island has a limited edition in hardback, but the paperback will be available and Witek will sign them at the March 15 event. The paperback will also be available at the Stetson Bookstore for the run of the Witek-Lopes retrospective show.

An award-winning poet and professor of English, Witek is the director of the Sullivan Creative Writing Program at Stetson and holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing. This year’s Sullivan Scholars will be introduced at the March 15 multi-media reading/performance.

Witek teaches poetry workshops and literature classes specializing in poetry at Stetson. She is the author of four other collections of poetry: The Shipwreck Dress (Orchises Press, 2008), Carnal World (Story Line Press, 2006), Fools and Crows (Orchises Press, 2003), and Courting Couples (winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest), as well as a scholarly book, Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self (University of Missouri Press, 1993). She has published poems in Slate, The Hudson Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and other journals, and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat and the state of Florida. Her poem It was a Pretty Good Book was recently featured on the Poetry Daily website.

Lopes’ work has been seen at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, El Museo del Barrio, ApexArt and the America’s Society in New York, and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, among other venues. In his native Brazil, the artist has shown at the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art of Salvador and the Museum of Art of  São Paulo, among other institutions. In the same period his work was also seen in art institutions in France, Germany, Poland, Chile, Portugal and, since 2009, in Guent, Nantes, Belfast, Florianópolis and Genoa. Lopes won Stetson’s Hand Award for Faculty Achievement in 2007, the Contemporary Art Museum Project award (St. Louis) in 2003, the World Studio Foundation Award in 2001, and the Premio Phillips Prize of a trip to Paris in 1997.

For more information, contact the English Department at (386) 822-7720.