As part of the University’s Jubilee activities, poet Dr.Timothy Steele will lecture and read from his own verse. The event is in conjunction with a display in the University Library exhibiting Steele’s work with commentary from critics.

At 10:20 a.m. Steele will present his lecture “The Metrical Muse,” and at 8 p.m. will read his own poetry. Both presentations will be in Talbot Theater. At 9 p.m. following the reading, a public signing is to be held in the Talbot Hall foyer, where Steele’s work will be on sale.

Steele’s presentations and the display are part of the Fletcher Lecture Series. The series, established in 1985, was named after Dr. Marie Fletcher, who died in 1983. Fletcher , a specialist in American Literature, was one of the first faculty members in the Nicholls English Department, now known as the Languages and Literature Department.

No public money is used for the Fletcher Series. The series is funded by a benefit held every fall.

Assistant librarian Anke Tonn, who oversees the displays in the University Library, said the students have a substantial opportunity with the Flecture Series.

“The series is an important part of the University’s lectures. Not all students have the opportunity to listen to a well known living author,” Tonn said.

The Fletcher committee includes instructor Alice Daigle, who organized the Fletcher display for the library.

“It’s a first-rate lecture series which can compare to any other University across the country. The lecturers always leave impressed with Nicholls,” Daigle said.

The series has brought many distinguished names in American literature to the Nicholls campus. Among them are Robert Penn Warren, the only American to win a Pulitzer for both poetry and fiction, and Lewis P. Simpson, a leading authority on Southern literature.

Steele, a professor of English at California State University in Los Angeles, continues this tradition.

Born in 1948, Steele received his Bachelor’s degree from Stanford and his Ph.D. from Brandeis. He is the author of four collections of poems, as well as a book on literary criticism. His first collection, “Uncertainties and Rest,” was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979.

He is the winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the academy of American Poets.

Distinguished Professor of Languages and Literature and Fletcher committee member, Dr. David Middleton said that Steele’s work is highly accessible to the reader.

“Steele’s poetry is accessible and utterly clear, and he writes with deep sympathy for other people and things in the natural world other than himself,” Middleton said.

He said Steele’s work falls into a more traditional category, rather than that of free verse poetry.

“For those who love the poetry of Robert Frost, a fellow New Englander, Timothy Steele is a poet whose work you will come to love,” Middleton said.