Coastal Carolina University professor Dan Albergotti will conduct poetry readings, followed by an open discussion about the value of poetry in contemporary society, on Wednesday, March 7 at 7 p.m. in the Waccamaw Higher Education Center in Litchfield. This event is free and open to the public.

This is the fifth event in Coastal's "Unheard, Unseen, Unsolved" dialogue series, sponsored by the Board of Visitors of Coastal's Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts.

Dan Albergotti, an assistant professor of English, will read from his works and discuss how over the last century poetry has become more of an academic pursuit and less popular with the general public. He will explain why, despite this trend, poetry is still relevant and powerful. Albergotti's poems have appeared in Ascent, Meridian, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2003 Sewanee Writers' Conference, a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2004, and the Richard Soref Scholar in Poetry at the 2004 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Albergotti's chapbook, "Charon's Manifest," won the 2005 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Competition, and one of his poems was reprinted in Best New Poets 2005. His poem, "Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale," won the 2005 Oneiros Press Poetry Broadside Contest and was printed in a limited letterpress edition in late 2006.

A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, he currently serves as poetry editor of the storySouth, an online journal.

For more information contact 349-4030.