Award-winning poet A. Van Jordan will read from his work Tuesday, Jan. 22 at 4:30 p.m. at Coastal Carolina University. The event is free and open to the public.

The reading, which was originally set for Jan. 24, will be in the Wall Auditorium of the E. Craig Wall Sr. College of Business Administration. It is part of the Words to Say It Visiting Writers Series supported by the Department of English.

Jordan serves on the faculties of the University of Texas at Austin and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He was awarded a Whiting Writers Award in 2005 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem Workshop and earned a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

His work focuses on resistance to racism through blues and jazz music. Jordan is the author of "Quantum Lyrics" as well as "Rise," which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was selected for the Book of the Month Club by the Academy of American Poets. His second book, "M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A," which takes the voice of MacNolia Cox, a young African-American girl who entered the 1936 National Spelling Bee, was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and listed as one of the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times.

For more information, call Dan Albergotti, coordinator of the series, at 349-2420.