The Warren County Community College Visiting Authors Series continues Wednesday, Feb. 15, with a reading by Jim Haba, an artist, poet, and founding director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in room 123A. It is free and open to the public.

Haba is a painter and poet who is also widely-known for his work with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry festival in North America, which was held at Waterloo Village for most of his tenure. Bill Moyers, former White House Press Secretary and esteemed journalist, called Haba the “driving force from 1986 through 2008” of the Festival. Regarding his poetry, Moyers admires how Haba “writes poems that connect to the navel of human experience.” Haba grew up in rural Washington state, both east and west of the Cascade Mountains: to the east on farms and orchards in the Yakima Valley; to the west in state parks his stepfather pioneered on Bainbridge and Camano Islands. He now divides his time now between Central New Jersey, surrounded again by fields and park land, and the outer reaches of Cape Cod.

During the event, Haba will present his own poems as well as some of his favorite poems by others that were read aloud during the first 23 years of the Dodge Poetry Festival’s existence.

The WCCC Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpreters are available with two weeks’ notice.

Upcoming author visits to Warren County Community College include Scott McVay on March 2; poet and essayist Emilia Phillips on March 30; and Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, on April 19.

Warren County Community College offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and one of only five in the nation to be recognized as a viable A.F.A. by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  For more information about the Visiting Authors Series or the A.F.A. in Creative Writing, please visit www.warren.edu or call 908-835-WCCC.