Eminent American poet John Ashbery will give the fifth annual Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 18, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The event is co-organized by the Center for Talented Youth.

Ashbery is recognized as one of America's most important poets. The New York Review of Books has said, "Ashbery, our poet with the finest ear for language, speaks of what eludes words, what lies outside them and stubbornly continues being something else."

First appearing on the literary scene via a 1956 award of the Yale Younger Poets Series, Ashbery has gone on since to publish 20 books of poetry and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for the 1975 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the Robert Frost Medal and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. He is currently Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

The Ringel Memorial Reading has been given since 1998 in memory of Joshua Ringel, of Baltimore, who participated in several CTY programs during his teenage years, and later taught in Spain before his accidental death in 1996. The fund named for him supports an annual lecture in memory of his appreciation of poetry and imaginative writing.

The reading is free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:45 p.m. with light refreshments.