Strand will read from his work Thursday at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Salt Lake City Main Library, 210 E. 400 South. The next day in the same location, the public is invited to an informal, brown-bag lunch chat with Strand from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Strand, 73, taught at the University of Utah from 1981 to 1994, during which time he brought Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz and Derek Walcott to Salt Lake City. During Strand's Utah tenure, he also spent 1990-91 in Washington, D.C., as the U.S. Poet Laureate.

Strand is the author of 11 books of poems as well as a collection of short stories and several volumes of translations, poetry anthologies and art criticism. He received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection of poems Blizzard of One. A slender but dense collection, it contains 20 poems that are by turns sad, wise, witty and always mindful of the passage of time.

Strand left Utah in 1994 to teach at Johns Hopkins University and later at the University of Chicago. He now lives in New York City and teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

- Brandon Griggs