Acclaimed poets Gary Snyder and Bei Dao will discuss and read selections from their works on Nov. 17, beginning at 7:30 p.m., in the Barrick Museum Auditorium at UNLV. The reading, sponsored by the International Institute of Modern Letters, is free and open to the public.

Snyder has published 16 books of poetry and prose, including " Turtle Island," which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975. In addition, he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003, and is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

Dao, exiled from China in 1989, is one of the foremost poets of the "misty school." His early poems were a source of inspiration for many during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He has been awarded the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry, as well as a

Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He has also been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and currently serves as the Mackey Poet in Residence at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

For more information on the event, contact Mandy Kalish at 895-4366.