TWO leading American writers feature in the final performance of the Wordsworth Trust summer poetry reading season.

Next Tuesday (October 25) at 6.30pm, Tom Sleigh and Jane Hirshfield complete the trust's programme of 27 readings, which has brought almost 40 prose and poetry writers to Grasmere.

Texas-born Tom Sleigh is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has received honours and awards from the Lila Wallace/Readers' Digest Fund, the Poetry Society of America and the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations.

As well as a translation of Euripides's Herakles, his collections include The Dreamhouse, The Chain, Waking, After One and the Far Side of the Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

No less a lyrical master than Seamus Heaney has described Sleigh's poetry as "hard-earned and well-founded. It refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution."

Fellow American and award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield will be joining him for the reading, which is being held at the Prince of Wales Hotel, across the A591 from Dove Cottage.

Jane, who was born in New York City, has written several books of poetry including Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart (1997), The October Palace (1994), Of Gravity and Angels (1988), and Alaya (1982).

She has also edited and translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) with Mariko Aratani and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994).

Her honours include the Poetry Centre Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation Centre Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.

In 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets, an honour formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound.

Meanwhile, Deborah Maurice of Cumbria's Collaborators Theatre fame stages the Erotic in Puppet Theatre at the trust's Jerwood Centre tomorrow (Saturday) from 11am.

The workshop is an introduction to the artist's approach to writing and designing for adult puppet theatre, and will include a short performance.

Deborah is researching erotica in puppet theatre and dramaturgies in the East and during the Collaborators director's workshop will explore synergies with others arts as well as what is taboo in what is often an under appreciated art form.

Tickets for the Hirshfield and Sleigh reading are £6 at the door, £5 if pre-booked. Deborah's workshop is £25. Bookings are further details are available on 015394-35544.