A Kansas-born poet along with the Kansas City Star book editor and a Kansas City area poetry professor will be featured tonight and Thursday at Kansas University.

Poet Jeff Worley, a Wichita native and graduate of Wichita State University, will present a poetry reading at 3 p.m. Thursday in the North Gallery of Spencer Research Library. Worley, editor of Odyssey Magazine published by the University of Kentucky, has published his poetry in numerous periodicals and is the author of two chapbooks: “Natural Selections” (with Lance Olsen; Still Waters Press, 1993) and “The Other Heart” (Devil’s Millhopper Press, 1991). He recently won Atlanta Review’s 2002 International Poetry Competition.

The Fall Poetry Panel, sponsored by the KU English department, will feature Worley, book editor John Mark Eberhart and poet Stanley Banks, an Avila University artist-in-residence, at 7 p.m. tonight in the Gridiron Room in KU’s Burge Union.

Banks, who teaches poetry, fiction, and playwriting and African-American literature at Avila in Kansas City, has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and Kansas City’s Writers Place Award.