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In her only New Hampshire appearance, poet and 10-time MacDowell Colony resident Mary Jo Salter, will read from her forthcoming collection, An Open Book, on Wednesday, May 8th, 2002, at 7 p.m. The Peterborough Library, a fitting setting for Salter’s appearance given her longtime connection to The MacDowell Colony, is co-sponsoring the event with The New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Salter, who has published four collections of poetry, has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Amy Lowell Poetry Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Peter Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Atlantic Monthly, among others. Since 1995, Salter has been the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Her poetry has been characterized as having “poise and depth, wit and passion.” In this new collection to be published by Knopf in the spring of 2003, Salter says she was not aware of any thematic connections until two-thirds of the way in when she realized her obsessions. “A lot of it is about how we read in the literal and metaphorical sense of that word.” To that end, many of the poems take place in ordinary reading settings — libraries, subways — where more extraordinary things emerge.

Salter was awarded her first residency at MacDowell in 1979 and has worked on several of her books there, including An Open Book. At the reading Salter will announce the MacDowell Colony’s new initiative of collecting signed books for the Peterborough Library donated by writers-in-residence at MacDowell.

Each year the Colony awards residencies of up to two months to more than 100 writers among other creative artists. The residencies often result in published work. The books given to the library will be identified with a bookplate. “Having books created in Peterborough in the local library will provide a wonderful link between the reader, the author, and the Colony,” said Cheryl Young, MacDowell’s executive director.