The Fortner Writers’ Forum will join forces with the St. Andrews Art Department for an Art Opening and Reading in the Vardell Building on the St. Andrews Presbyterian College campus at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

Rachel Davis will present her recent work in a show while seven-time Pushcart Award nominee Sam Silva will provide his literary work in a reading.

“Sam Silva and I take a good deal of mutual inspiration from each other, and bounce ideas off each other all the time, I for more literary and poetic clarity, and he for the passion and energy which he calls ‘angelic’ in my work,” said Davis of recent collaborative publications such as “Saltwater Dreams.” “For me, that is what most excites me about this collaboration.”

Davis received her bachelor’s degree in art from Winthrop College before earning her master’s degree in art education with an emphasis on painting from East Carolina University.

After spending 10 years in the Dominican Republic and working at the Fine Arts Institute in San Francisco de Macoris, Davis returned to the United States to teach art to junior high students for 21 years in the Fort Bragg School System. She retired in 1995 and received an Emerging Artist Grant from the Fayetteville Arts Council in 1995-1996.

“I think that stylistically and even metaphorically my work is influenced by the years I spent in the Dominican Republic,” Davis said. “There were paradisiacal elements there, but it was not always paradise. I did not draw or paint very much at the time, but the images, the desire to paint, to be an artist haunted me there and haunts me still … and at the same time has nurtured my particular perspective.”