FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington will celebrate Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair’s recent 2015 PEN New England Award for Poetry.

A reception and reading will be held at 6 p.m. Friday, June 19, in the Emery Community Arts Center at UMF. The event is free and open to the public.

Blood and Memory — A Celebration of Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair and the PEN New England Award will include an opening reception followed by readings of McNair’s work featuring UMF faculty members Kristen Case, Shana Youngdahl, Daniel Gunn, Jeffrey Thomson, Professor Emeritus McNair and a solo piano piece by Philip Carlsen.

“All of UMF congratulates Wes on this very prestigious honor,” Jeffrey Thomson, UMF professor of creative writing, said.

“This PEN New England Award for ‘The Lost Child,’ continues to prove that Wes is not only a poet of New England but a voice for the country, and indeed the world. In this book-length poem of blood and history, he writes not only of a people — us — at the end of hope, but ultimately of the stories that sustain us.”

PEN is a global organization to celebrate literature and this is one of the major national awards for a book of poems.

McNair recently received the distinguished award in a ceremony at the Kennedy Library in Boston. The award was given for McNair’s new collection of poetry, “The Lost Child; Ozark Poems.”

McNair, Maine poet laureate and UMF writer in residence, is regarded by U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine as, “one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” McNair was appointed to a five-year term as Maine Poet Laureate in 2011 by Maine Gov. Paul LePage.

McNair is the author of 20 books, including 10 volumes of poetry, three books of nonfiction and several edited anthologies. His most recent books are “The Lost Child: Ozark Poems” (Godine, 2014), “The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry” (CMU, 2012) and “Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems” (Godine, 2010).

The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, he has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Emmy Award.

McNair has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress, served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology and has served four times on the nominating jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In 2006, he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship as one of “America’s finest living artists.”