Poet Sassy Ross will be featured at a wine and cheese reading today, Tuesday, August 18, at 5:30 p.m. at The Yard on Middle Road in Chilmark. Admission is $25 for general seating; $15 for seniors and those under age 30.

Born on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Ms. Ross moved to Virginia at the age of ten. She began writing poetry as an undergraduate student at Pennsylvania State University as a way of reclaiming the years, landscape and dialects of youth. Ms. Ross says that the purpose of her writing is to make visible what, without the poem, might never be seen. Her poetry hinges on the complexity of the family, particularly the experience of being “brought into the world by one mother, raised by another, and abandoned by both.”Her work is constantly negotiating her own geography, striving to maintain a balance between successions of hyphenated selves: immigrant-native, daughter-orphan, poet-scholar.

She received her masters of fine arts in poetry from New York University, where she was nominated for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. She has taught Creative Writing at NYU and high school English in the Students at the Center program in New Orleans, where she was a member of the Nommo Literary Workshop. She is the managing editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters. She is currently a vice-presidential fellow in the PhD program in English literature and poetry at the University of Utah.

For details, call 508-645-9662 or see online dancetheyard.org