Marking the launch of Doveglion: Collected Poems,
Penguin Classics’ reissue of Jose Garcia Villa's poems, editor John Edwin Cowen, Villa's literary trustee, and book introducer Luis H. Francia will read poems from the collection Monday afternoon, Aug.5 and Tuesday night, Aug.6, at the Jefferson Market Library in New York City.

The timing of both the Penguin reissue and the two readings celebrate the centennial of Villa’s birth on Aug.5, 1908. A Philippine National Artist for Literature, he died in 1997 at a hospital in Greenwich Village.

Known as the "Pope of Greenwich Village," Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet in a group of modern literary giants in 1940's New York that included E.E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams and a young Gore Vidal. Villa was a global poet, admired for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in bravely deep poems," in the words of the American poet Marianne Moore.

The Jefferson Market Library is at 425 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) at the corner of 10th St, close to where the American poet E.E. Cummings lived. He was a major influence on Villa.

At noon on August 5th, the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC AM 820 and FM 93.9 will be interviewing Cohen and Francia on Villa’s life and work. This will be followed by the Asia Pacific Forum show, WBAI, 8-9 p.m., FM, 99.9. It can be accessed online at www.asiapacificforum.org.

Another, larger reading will be held on September 22 at New York University, sponsored by the Asian/ Pacific/ American Studies program.