In honor of the 50th anniversary of the composition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems, members of the Writers' Workshop faculty will join Robyn Schiff, director of undergraduate writing at the University of Iowa, to read from the collection at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 30, in a free Prairie Lights reading streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

Ariel was published posthumously in 1965. Originally edited and compiled by her husband, British poet Ted Hughes, a new version of Ariel was released in 2004 that restores Plath’s original order and the 12 poems missing from the first version. The new version also contains a foreword by her daughter, Frieda Hughes, herself a poet and a painter.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and the aforementioned Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.