By KRISTA CONGER

The Irish poet Eavan Boland will discuss “The Science of Curing and The Art of Healing: A Poet’s Experience” at the 13th annual Jonathan J. King Lectureship Feb. 11.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 5 p.m. in Fairchild Auditorium. A reception will follow.

Boland, who has published eight volumes of poetry, is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

Boland has received the Lannan Award for Poetry and has published a volume of prose called “Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time.” Her most recent collection of poems “Against Love Poetry” was published in 2001.

Boland is credited with championing the cause of female Irish writers in the traditionally male-dominated world of Irish literature.

She has been the Hurst Professor and the Regent’s Professor at Washington University, and the Regent’s Lecturer at UC-Santa Barbara. She is on the board of the Irish Art Council and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

Boland is also on the advisory board of the International Writers Center at Washington University.

Boland will draw from her experiences in the arts program of an Irish hospital and from a writer’s perceptions of language and sense of survival to emphasize the importance of the language of hope in a terminal hospital environment.

The Jonathan J. King Lectureship honors Jonathan King, a computer scientist and philosopher. King, who was associated with the Section on Medical Informatics at the School of Medicine, received his master’s degree and his PhD in computer science at Stanford.

Later, he became an advocate for patient’s rights after his diagnosis of cancer in 1989, and he established the lecture series before his death in 1991 to bring several key messages to the attention of the medical community.

Focusing on maintaining the dignity of the patient by making medical environments and treatments more humane, they include involving the patient in decisions about his or her care, fostering feelings of hope and control, and cultivating a heightened sensitivity to a patient’s feelings and concerns.

Previous Jonathan King Lecturers have included an AIDS patient, a geriatrician specializing in end-of-life issues, a bioethicist and a pain management expert.

The Jonathan J. King Lectureship is sponsored by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford Medical Informatics, The Stanford Health Library and the Paul & Borghild Petersen Foundation.