Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 29, 1994                   TAG: 9409300004
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NANCY GLEINER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POET HAS LESSON ON LISTENING

Earlier in the day, Rios will be the guest speaker for the college's weekly Convocation Series at 11:20 a.m. in the Sutton Student Center Ballroom. His topic is "The Listening Language." Both events are open to the public at no charge.

"We should all concentrate on what is probably our shared first language: the language of listening,'' Rios said in a telephone conversation from his home in Tempe, Ariz. ``We need to learn about the quiet as much as the loud. It's often difficult, but it's worth a great deal."

Rios is a talented teller of stories, whose poems often suggest oral traditions, including Spanish ballads. He has said of his background, "My father, born in southern Mexico, and my mother, born in England, gave me a language-rich, story-fat upbringing."

Rios, 42, received a bachelor of arts degree in English literature and creative writing and in psychology, as well as a master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

He is currently a Regents' professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at Arizona State University.

Rios considers himself an "artist-citizen," an artist who is also part of the community and contributes to it, a "person who makes his craft useful in the world."

He has initiated outreach programs in the Arizona area where he lives, introducing writing in unlikely settings and attempting to destagmatize poetry.

"I try to find all the suits of clothes writing can wear," he said, "and find what is common in us all." Any place is appropriate to connect people to writing.

The "Norton Anthology of American Literature," which includes his poetry, has said his "poems create a new landscape: a contemporary America beneath which lives an older way of life, and the country of the imagination we discover in genuine poems."

He has authored several books, including "Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses," "The Warrington Poems, "The Iguana Killer" and "Whispering to Fool the WInd."

His honors and awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, The 1984 Esquire Magazine Register, "The Best of the New Generation: Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America," and several Pushcart Prizes in poetry and fiction.

Rios's visit to Roanoke College is sponsored by the Donald L. Jordan Humanities Endowment and the Creative Writing Board.

For more information, call 375-2282.