Local Iowa City writing programs and businesses will celebrate the UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day on Friday and Saturday. UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, works to expand global dialogue and education.

Numerous events will take place throughout the weekend. At 11 a.m. Friday, the Iowa City Public Library will host “Closing Chapters Opening Attachments: The Near Future of the Book,” a discussion about the struggles of copyrighting and publishing in a digital age. At 2 p.m., a tour of the University of Iowa Center for the Book will begin in 29 North Hall. In-store specials will begin on Saturday at local libraries and independent bookstores Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St., and Iowa Book, 8 S. Clinton St.

Award-winning poets Aliki Barnstone and Robert Pinsky will read as well. Barnstone, a teacher at the University of Nevada who was first published at the age of 12, will read at 4 p.m. Saturday at Prairie Lights. The received a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. Her work has been showcased in Poetry, New Letters, the New York Times, Ms., Agni, Chicago Review, and the Antioch Review, among other publications.

The event will conclude with a reading by poet Pinsky in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber at 7 p.m. Saturday. After earning a B.A. degree from Rutgers University, Pinksy received a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His book of poems, The Figured Wheels: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. That same year he served as the U.S Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

During this time he organized the Favorite Poem Project, a program that encouraged poetry in the everyday lives of Americans.

— by Laura Willis