Latest Collection from Lit House Director Dubrow Draws from her Adolescence in Communist Poland

CHESTERTOWN, MD—In the cover image of professor Jehanne Dubrow’s latest volume of poetry, tight rows of bullets stand on end like soldiers at attention, their lockstep rigidity broken front and center by an open tube of lipstick.  That red-tipped symbol of female sexuality and heat disturbing the relentless monotony of cold, hard metal is a perfect introduction to the storylines Dubrow’s poems trace on the pages inside.

Red Army Red (TriQuarterly Books, October 31, 2012) paints scenes from Cold War Poland and the lifting of the Iron Curtain while it also shares a young girl’s journey through the bewildering geography of puberty and into sexual awakening. Dubrow uses the oppressive language of the Cold War to speak about the oppressive nature of  adolescence, and she employs the vocabulary of economic systems—Communism and capitalism—as metaphors for the excesses and deprivations of puberty. “That we experience large-scale, structural traumas as small-scale, personal ones is among the profundities on which Jehanne Dubrow’s Red Army Red is built,” poet H.L. Hix writes on the book jacket.  

In many of its details, the book chronicles Dubrow’s own coming of age as the daughter of American diplomats stationed in Poland in the 1980s. Born in Italy, she also spent time with her family in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Belgium and Austria. But for seven of her pre-teen and teenage years, the family lived in Communist-era Warsaw.

Dubrow teaches creative writing and literature and is Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College. Red Army Red is her fourth book. Her first, The Hardship Post, won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award in 2009, and her second, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Competition, also in 2009. Stateside was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. Dubrow’s poetry, creative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, West Branch, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Copper Nickel and Prairie Schooner.

Her many honors include the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and Howard Nemerov Poetry Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Rose O'Neill Literary House Director Jehanne Dubrow Wins Prestigious Poetry Prize

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Jehanne Dubrow, assistant professor of creative writing and English at Washington College and interim director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, has won the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.

Dubrow won the coveted prize, which includes a $1,000 cash award, for her manuscript-in-progress, The Arranged Marriage, her first collection of prose poems, which explores a series of often harrowing episodes in her mother’s early life. The judge was Claudia Rankine, one of the country’s most distinguished poets. Author of four poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

“Each poem in Jehanne Dubrow’s manuscript-in-progress translates a form of violence and altogether adds up to a mosaic of assault,” wrote Rankine. “Details in these stunning prose poems are presented like mini still lifes creating patterns of preparation for victimization, retaliation, or escape.”

Dubrow, who will be feted at a dinner for this year’s Poetry Society of America award winners in New York City in May, describes the prize and Rankine’s affirmation of her work as “a tremendous honor. I usually work in traditional forms like sonnets and villanelles, so it’s been a big deal for me to work, for the first time, in prose poems,” she says. “I am really excited that someone like Claudia Rankine, who is so well known for working in these kinds of forms, would think I was doing it well.”

The country’s oldest poetry organization, the Poetry Society of America was founded in 1910 to create a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment and understanding of poetry. Its members have included many of the nation’s most celebrated poets – from Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay to John Ashbery and Louise Glück.

The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is given annually for a manuscript-in-progress of poetry or verse-drama in memory of a benefactor and friend of the Poetry Society of America. It is partially endowed by the estates of Rachel Dalven and Ellen Lamon Anderson.

“What’s cool about this prize is that, when you are working on a manuscript, it is so easy to doubt yourself,” says Dubrow. “It is wonderful and inspiring to have this kind of acknowledgment of a work that feels both concrete and, at the same time, in a state of becoming.”

The Arranged Marriage will be Dubrow’s fifth collection of poetry. Three poems from the collection won last year’s Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize for Poetry on the Jewish Experience. Her fourth book, Red Army Red, will be published by Northwestern University Press this fall.

Dubrow’s first book, The Hardship Post, won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award in 2009, and her second collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Competition, also in 2009. Stateside was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, The Promised Bride, in 2007.

Dubrow’s poetry, creative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, West Branch, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Copper Nickel and Prairie Schooner.

Her many honors include an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and Howard Nemerov Poetry Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Poetic Premiere: WC's Erin Murphy Releases New Collection Of Verse; Garners Poetry Prize

Chestertown, MD, June 24, 2004 — Erin Murphy, an instructor of creative writing and literature at Washington College and first-place winner of the 2003 National Writers Union Poetry Award, has released her first collection of poetry, Science of Desire, published this June by Word Press.

Murphy will debut her poems at the College with a reading and book-signing on Thursday, September 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of the Miller Library. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

“It's the mixture of verbal sensuousness and quick intelligence that appeals most strongly to me in these vivid poems,” said award-winning poet Eamon Grennan of Murphy's poetic style. “There's something intrepid, honest, insistent in her ability to negotiate at speed between facts and feelings. Anchored often in family, her imagination can float out on currents of edgy, idiosyncratic, individual revelation. Alert to the language itself, she is always physically mindful of its meanings, its play of possibilities. Behind the wry humor, there is a decent, sympathetic love for the ordinary stuff of the world, for how ‘apples [are] polished like memories.'”

Murphy, a 1990 graduate of Washington College, received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review,Field, Nimrod, The Paterson Literary Review, Literal Latte and Kalliope, and her awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Murphy's second collection of poetry, Too Much of This World, has garnered the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize and will be published by Mammoth Books. Publication date will be announced.

Science of Desire is available online through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and at theWashington College Bookstore. Samples of her poetry can be found online by visiting Word Press.