Peninsula College’s Foothills Writers Series welcomes prize-winning poet and essayist Lucia Perillo at noon April 27 when she reads from her newest volume of poetry in the college’s Little Theater, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., Port Angeles. The reading is free.

Perillo’s new collection "Inseminating the Elephant," has just been released by Copper Canyon Press of Port Townsend. The book is drawing generous praise from critics, and Perillo has enjoyed great audience response at readings in Seattle and Olympia.

Perillo also is the author of four other books of poetry and a collection of essays. "Dangerous Life" won the Norma Parker Award for best "first book" of 1989. "The Body Mutinies" won the Revson Foundation fellowship from PEN, the Kate Tufts prize from Claremont University and the Balcones Prize.

"Luck is Luck" was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and is included in the New York Public Library’s list of "books to remember." It also won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts prize. "The Oldest Map With the Name America," her fourth volume of poetry, was published by Random House.

Perillo captured wide critical attention with her essay collection "I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness and Nature." In the essays, Perillo confronts the realities of illness and how it has changed her formerly active lifestyle as a park ranger and avid hiker to one who now must observe nature from a wheelchair.

Perillo’s works have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic and the New Yorker, and have been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is featured in the current Poets and Writers. In 2000, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

She has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s College and Southern Illinois University and now lives in Olympia.