'World's Room' Poet Weiner to Give Reading at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Award-winning poet Joshua Weiner will read from his works in Washington College's Sophie Kerr Room on Thursday, November 15, at 4:30 p.m.

Weiner is the author of two books, The World's Room and From the Book of Giants. He has won the Whiting Award and the Rome Prize. His poems appear in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. The poetry editor of Tikkun, Weiner is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Booklist praised Weiner's first poetry collection, The World's Room, for its "immensely readable expressions of youthful joy and moral seriousness," and declared it "a very distinguished debut." Publishers Weekly lauded the combination of "narrative and lyric elements" that "range across subjects and kinds of speech" in Weiner's second collection,From the Book of Giants. "These poems aren't political in any easy way, but have politics, memory and language at their center in a manner that recalls former Poet Laureate Robert Hass's work... Weiner's formal and lyric gifts both soothe and shock in these poems."

Weiner's poetry reading is part of the 2007-2008 Sophie Kerr Lecture Series. The series honors the legacy of its namesake, a writer from Denton, Md., whose generosity has enriched Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to Washington 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"—the famed Sophie Kerr Prize—and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships and to help defray the costs of student publications.

Admission to Weiner's reading is free and open to the public. The Sophie Kerr Room is located in Miller Library. For more information, call 410/778-7879.

November 2, 2007