Award-wining poet David Mills will perform “My Soul Has Grown Deep Like the Rivers,” a dramatic rendition of the works of Langston Hughes, on Thursday, Feb. 23, at SUNY Oneonta.

The reading, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in the Craven Lounge of the Morris Conference Center. It is funded by a Student Development and Campus Enhancement Endowment grant and presented by the college’s departments of English and Africana and Latino Studies in celebration of Black History Month.

A 2010 Poet Laureate of Queens finalist and winner of the inaugural Pan African Literary Forum Poetry Prize, Mills is the author of the small press bestseller “The Dream Detective.” His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Jubilat, Transitions (Harvard University) Rattapallax, The Literary Review, Rolling Stone and the Boston Globe, among others, and he wrote a play commissioned and produced by the Juilliard School of Drama.

A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, New York Foundation for the Arts and Chicago State University, among others, Mills was featured in the PBS documentary “Slammin’.” He has recorded his work on RCA Records and toured Europe performing his poetry with musicians at the Vienna Jazz Festival and other venues.

After receiving a grant from the Soros Foundation, Mills traveled to Poland and the Czech Republic to write poems about the Holocaust and collaborate with European visual artists in a museum exhibition.

More information on this event is available from Veronica Diver at (607) 436-3449.