Many people, especially at a university dedicated to science and technology, stopped reading poetry after high school.

But April is National Poetry Month, and to help Iowa State celebrate a renowned poet will read from her award-winning debut collection tonight.

Jane Mead, who studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and still resides on the prairie between Hills and Iowa City, will be on hand at Big Table Books, located at 330 Main St. in downtown Ames, tonight.

She will be reading from The Lord and the General Din of the World, an anthology of poems which won the Kathryn A. Morton prize in Poetry.

In these works, Mead explores both the natural and the cultural spheres; she seems equally at home in a zinfandel vineyard or in a drug-rehab hospital.

These poems recount a painful personal struggle with both addiction and recovery, and they are fiercely determined.

“I’m not a victim,”Mead said in a press release. “Ithink I do what everyone does: you try first to survive; then you try to go beyond surviving, to create some intelligent way to live.

“But negotiating what you’ve been handed doesn’t make you a victim. I mean, I may not be thrilled to have been born human either, but I don’t feel victimized by that fate.”

Currently, Mead lives in a cottage in Iowa, where she raises Small Munsterlander versatile hunting dogs and teaches private poetry workshops.

She will read from The Lord and the General Din of the World tonight, starting at 7:30 p.m., at Big Table Books in downtown Ames. For more information, call Big Table Books at 232-8976.