FARMINGTON — Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, author “Slamming Open the Door,” a collection of poetry about losing her daughter, Leidy, to a tragic act of violence, will give a benefit reading for Sexual Assault Victims Emergency Services, Franklin County’s sexual assault crisis response project. Bonanno will read on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m. in Lincoln Auditorium on the University of Maine at Farmington campus.

“Slamming Open the Door” received local publishing house Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawley Award in 2008. The collection traces the lines of grief that formed around Bonanno’s life when her daughter, Leidy, was murdered by an ex-partner. Leidy was 21 and a recent graduate of nursing school when she died in 2003.

Since its release in April 2009, “Slamming Open the Door” has received wide critical acclaim for its bold, honest, and emotive poems. The New York Times Book Review writes: “To read this book is not to behold a completed work but to stand onstage with a writer who finds herself in the middle of a story in which she has been reluctantly cast.” And poet Sharon Olds, author of The Dead and the Living, calls Slamming Open the Door a gift: “…a gift of power, truth, rage, and beauty.”

This event is sponsored by SAVES, Alice James Books, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the UMF Creative Writing Department.

To learn more about SAVES or to get involved, contact SAVES at 778-9522 or visit SAVES’ Web site at www.savesrapecrisis.org. If you would like information or support related to any type of sexual violence, call the 24-hour confidential helpline at 1-800-871-7741. If you are a cell phone user in Franklin County, you may call 1- 866-740-9516. TTY is available for the Deaf and hard of hearing at 1-800-458-5599.