“Jean Monahan’s Hands surprises the reader at every turn. These are poems of brilliant physicality in description, dramatic and often objective,” wrote poet Donald Hall in awarding Monahan the 1991 Anhinga Prize.

Vijay Seshadri, author of Wild Kingdom, described Monahan’s poems as “by turns tender and violent, ruefully intelligent and well-informed, and absolutely authentic.”

Monahan, has won the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA’s Open Voice Award and the John Williams Andrews Narrative Poetry Contest. She also was named runner-up in the 1991 National Poetry Competition.

Isaacson’s interest in reaching out to children, combined with his ability as a photographer, earned him a Horn Book award for his acclaimed work, Round Buildings, Square Buildings & Buildings That Wiggle Like a Fish, a study of the aesthetics of architecture for young readers. He has also written on the aesthetics of art, including A Short Walk Around the Pyramids and Through the World of Art. Isaacson is a frequent lecturer, contributor of essays, and a book reviewer on a variety of art-related subjects.

As an attorney and advocate for the arts, Isaacson has been actively engaged in the practice of law in Lewiston since 1950. He is currently senior partner in the firm of Isaacson & Raymond. His legal career has included roles as president of the Androscoggin County Bar Association, corporation counsel for the City of Lewiston and assistant county attorney for Androscoggin County.

Isaacson earned his bachelor’s degree from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College in 1947 and his law degree from Harvard. Known as “the dean of Maine art critics,” he has reviewed for the Maine Sunday Telegram since 1966.

Reddick, who is pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C., has worked for a tropical research and sustainable development firm and earned a master’s in Latin American conservation and development from the University of Florida. He also has taught secondary school in Colombia and conducted field research in Argentina and Chile.

Next in the Readings with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Authors series will be noted attorney, art critic, essayist and children’s book author Philip Isaacson at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 7, in the Special Collections room of Ladd Library.

Chute’s books of poetry include Thirteen Moons-Treize Lunes, When Grandmother Decides to Die, Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems and Samuel Sewall Sails for Home, which won the Maine Arts Commission chapbook award in 1986. He received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the editorial board of The Beloit Poetry Journal, for “Heat Wave in Concord,” a poem re-creating a scorching afternoon in 1852 when Henry David Thoreau cooled himself with a walk in a nearby river.

“This is a delicately erotic and exquisitely detailed portrait of a man, a day and an era,” said Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal editor. “Chute has invented a fluid stanza to carry his narrative.”

Chute, Professor Emeritus of Biology and past chairman of both the department of biology and division of natural sciences at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Chute, who lives in Poland, served as director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and was chairman of the state Commission on Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering.

Boza and her parents left Cuba for Miami in 1960, when she was 8 years old, after the Havana newspaper where her father was a senior editor was closed by the Castro government. Scattering the Ashes, (Bilingual Press, Arizona State University, 1998) the product of what Boza calls her quest to understand the reasons for her father’s suicide, is a book about Cuba and the power of history and politics over Cubans’ daily lives.

He “loved Cuba above all other things, animate or inanimate, real or imagined, remembered or forgotten,” wrote Boza of her father, Ramiro Boza, an ardent anti-Communist, who, discouraged, ill and depressed, shot himself in 1989.

As Boza watched aging, misunderstood Cuban exiles parade past the coffin at her father’s Miami wake, she became committed to exploring the reasons behind their single-minded devotion to Cuba, their restlessness even in a comfortable land of safety and their bitterness about their fate at the hands of both Castro’s government and U.S. administrations.

“This father-haunted Cuban memoir is absolutely mesmerizing,” wrote Howard Norman, author of the acclaimed novels The Bird Artist and The Museum Guard. “Scattering the Ashes immediately enters the most rarified, intimate room of posterity. Boza’s writing has unmitigated integrity, beauty, courage and passion.”

A Lewiston resident, Boza co-edited the anthology Nosotras: Latina Literature Today and wrote Questions from a Foreigner, which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Boza, a tutor in the Writing Workshop at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Barnard College and received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.

Boza’s talk is part of the semester-long Readings with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Authors series.