Poet Ann Neelon To Read From Her Works, February 10

Chestertown, MD, January 26, 2005 — Washington College's Sophie Kerr Committee presents a reading by poet Ann Neelon, Thursday, February 10, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library. The reading is free and the public is invited to attend.

Neelon is the author of the collection Easter Vigil, which took the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and the RPCV Readers and Writers Award, and is currently completing a book-length sequence inspired by the Boston busing crisis. A native of Boston and a former Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, Neelon holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been a Wallace Stenger Fellow as well as Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She is also the winner of the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and of fellowships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Yaddo Artists Colony. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Gettysburg Review and Manoa, and her recent work has appeared in the anthology Snakebird and is upcoming in the Mid-American Review.

Neelon currently teaches creative writing, poetry and poetics, translation and contemporary world literature at Murray State University and lives in western Kentucky with her husband and two sons.

The reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which works to carry on the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, MD, whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to the College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most “ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor” and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships, and to help defray the costs of student publications.