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Noted poet William Heyen will appear as part of Aquinas College's Contemporary Writers Series on Thursday, September 30 in the Wege Student Center Ballroom at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Heyen has written several poetry collections, including recently published Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, Falling From Heaven, and Shoah Train. Heyen also edited a collection of writing that was produced in reaction to the September 11, 2001 tragedy, called September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.

A Brooklyn, New York native, Heyen currently is a professor of English and poet in residence at State University of New York, where he specializes in teaching modern and contemporary poetry. A former senior Fulbright Lecturer, Heyen was awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He has also been published in American Poetry Review, Harper's, Ontario Review and The New Yorker and more than a hundred anthologies.

The Aquinas College Contemporary Writers Series was founded by a grant from Dr. Tony Foster '73 and Linda Nemec Foster '72. The series kicked off in 1997 by bringing well-known authors to Aquinas College for a public reading and a workshop with students.

Other writers appearing in the series this year include Lee Gutkind on Oct. 27 and Diane Wakoski on March 16.