Pulitzer-prize winning poet Jorie Graham will do a public reading of her new book, “Never,” at a reception at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday in the Hinde Auditorium, as part of Sacramento State?s 10th Annual Festival of the Arts.

Graham has written eight books of original poems and edited two anthologies. Her volume of selected poems, “The Dream of the Unified Field,” from her first five books, “Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts,” “The End of Beauty,” “Region of Unlikeness” and “Materialism,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

“She is a type of not learning from books,” said Joshua McKinney, a Sac State English professor. “What she often deals with is integration of mind and body in physical work, metaphysical ideas as well as bodily experience.”

Born in New York during the 1950s, Graham spent her childhood in Italy and attended French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris but was expelled after participating in a student protest.

During film school at New York University, Graham recalls how poetry entered her life, when she heard some lines of T.S. Eliot?s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” while lost in the halls.

“It was like something being played in the key my soul recognized,” she said in the New Yorker in 1997, before turning to poetry in her mid 20s. She eventually received her master?s in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1978.

Using common words and phrases to narrate her surroundings and experiences, Graham finds the luminous amidst mundane scenes of daily life such as kitchen tables, hotels and fields. “She is like no one else, neither in her rhythms nor in her insistence on opening up, scrutinizing, and even reversing our experience of time and space,” the Literary Supplement said.”Graham addresses fundamental human questions: is there a God? What is human will? What does it mean to be mortal?” April Bernard said in a New York Times Book Review.

Graham has received numerous literary awards such as the MacArthur Fellowship, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1997.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writer?s Workshop and is currently the first woman to hold the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.

Admission to the reception is free. Graham will sign copies of her books on sale after the reception. For more information on Jorie Graham?s appearance visit www.csus.edu/events.