Mark Doty will be the featured speaker at the People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos annual benefit, “Notable Words: An Evening Honoring Keith Wheelock” on March 11. The evening of readings will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Nassau Club, Princeton.

Proceeds from the event will go to the reading and discussion program, which is offered in English or Spanish for adults and young adults who have had limited opportunities to experience the “transformative power of great and enduring literature.”

Mr. Doty won the 2008 National Book Award for poetry, and his first book of poems, Turtle Swan, published in 1987, earned praise from Booklist as “an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering.” My Alexandria, published in 1993, won Britain’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; Doty was the first American poet to whom it was given. Publishers Weekly praised Deep Lane (2015) this way: “Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet.”

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University James Richardson, whose most recent volume of poems, By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms,” was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, will introduce Mr. Doty. The evening will honor Keith Wheelock, a longtime friend of People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos.

For reservations, please email patandres@peopleandstories.org or contact Pat Andres at (609) 882-4864. Ticket prices range from $100-$1,500. Sponsors ($250) receive a dinner with the author before the reading, Patrons ($500) include dinner and a signed book, and Benefactors ($1,500) receive dinner for two, two tickets and two signed books. Tickets are also available on at www.peopleandstories.org.

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