Sheryl St. Germain, assistant professor of English at Knox College, will present a reading "Masks of the Heart: Poems and Prose".on Friday, January 31 at 4 p.m. in the Common Room, Old Main at Knox College. This event is sponsored by the Caxton Club.

The selections are drawn from St. Germain's published collection of poems, The Journals of Scheherazade, and from a work-in-progress, Intimate Frontiers: A Woman's Journey From Louisana To Alaska. The work-in-progress is a collection of essays written during her experience hiking, camping and fishing in Southeast Alaska during summer 1995. She explains that this journal chronicles a journey into the swamps and wilds of her family in Lousiana, as well as it relates to Alaska; a place she has no complicated history or family. The work-in-progress presents a universal theme of one woman's struggle working with grief, loneliness, wildness, sex and language while traveling through the last American wilderness.

A National Endowment for the Arts grant and research award from Knox supported St. Germain in her work on Intimate Frontiers.

Founded in 1837, Knox is an independent, four-year, liberal arts college, located in Galesburg, Illinois, with 1,100 students from 42 states and 33 nations. Knox's "Old Main," a National Historic Landmark, is the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.