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.

Professor Deckman Named "Affiliated Scholar" At the Public Religion Research Institute

WASHINGTON, DC – Dr. Melissa Deckman, chair of the political science department at Washington College, is one of five “leading academic voices” named as the first Affiliated Scholars of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). She will regularly contribute insights to the Institute’s “Faith in the Numbers” research blog and will work with its senior researchers on peer-review articles.

Founded in 2009 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Public Religion Research Institute has become a leading resource for non-partisan analysis of the role of religion in public and political life and the opinions that members of religious communities hold about topical issues. The creation of the Affiliated Scholars Program enhances the Institute’s ability to provide perspective on the 2012 presidential election and the role religion and religious groups will play in shaping its outcome.

Deckman says PRRI is quickly establishing itself as a major source for news and analysis and she is excited about her new relationship with the organization.  “As a scholar of religion and politics, I am grateful to have access to their excellent survey data, especially as we gear up for an exciting presidential election race this fall.”

The Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs at Washington College, Deckman has written or co-written three books and contributed to dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. Her 2004 book, School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics, won the American Political Science Association’s Hubert Morken Award for the best work on religion and politics.  She edited a forthcoming volume about the politics of teaching the Bible and religion in public schools (slated for publication this fall), and her current research focuses on the nexus between gender and religion in the Tea Party movement.

Joining Deckman as 2012-2013 Affiliated Scholars at PRRI are Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison College and co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Politics & Religion; Kerem Ozan Kalkan, incoming visiting assistant professor of political science at Stony Brook University; Laura R. Olson, professor of political science at Clemson University and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion; and Mark J. Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, says the Institute is “thrilled to be able to provide not only additional original research but also more timely insights for better understanding the role of religion in this fall’s presidential election.” To learn about the Institute and its new Affiliated Scholars Program, visit www.publicreligion.org.

Read her first blog posting, "How an Evangelical College’s Lawsuit Could Help Romney."

Composer Sets Jehanne Dubrow's Poems to Music

Song cycle of From the Fever-World

to Premiere May 13 in Illinois

HIGHLAND PARK, IL—Poet and professor Jehanne Dubrow, director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, will hear her words set to music when Polish composer Johanna Bruzdowicz’s song cycle From the Fever-World premiers Sunday afternoon, May 13.  Presented by the Pilgrim Chamber Players, the performance will take place in the Highland Park Community House, Highland Park, Ill., and will feature six musicians — a string quartet, a pianist, and a mezzo-soprano.  

The new chamber music piece is the composer’s adaptation of six poems from Dubrow’s book of the same name, From the Fever-World, a series of fragments written in the voice of an imaginary Yiddish poet named Ida Lewin. Dubrow was inspired to create Ida, along with her fictional Polish town circa the 1930s, while doing research as a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in D.C. Reading community memory books from disappeared Jewish towns in Eastern Europe, she began to invent the kind of Yiddish poet she would hope to come across as a historian and translator.

A reviewer in the online journal Blackbird praised the poetry of From the Fever-World as “a remarkable and moving work of the imagination,” in which Dubrow offers “a fully formed and often harsh world of ritual, dailiness, loss and sheer terror.”   

Dubrow spent an international childhood as the daughter of diplomats with postings throughout Europe. She knew Bruzdowicz from her family’s time in Poland and sent the composer a copy of From the Fever-World when it was first published in 2007. “It seemed like a collection that Johanna might like,” says Dubrow, explaining the origins of the artistic partnership. “The collection is inherently theatrical,” she adds, “it reads like a series of dramatic monologues.”  When Bruzdowicz determined they were inherently musical as well, Dubrow recommended which poems could stand on their own when transformed into song. 

A native of Warsaw, Bruzdowicz started composing at age 12. She has since composed four operas and an opera-musical (Tides and Waves), plus music for ballet, symphonies, chamber groups, television, plays and films. An advocate for new music, she includes electroacoustic and electronic music in her considerable repertoire. She also is an accomplished writer with music criticism, screenplays and television scripts to her credit.

Dubrow will hear Bruzdowicz’s interpretation of her poetry for the first time during rehearsals the Friday morning before the premier. It’s something she looks forward to with great anticipation. She hopes the musical version of the From the Fever-World will subsequently be performed not only in the countries where the composer holds dual citizenship, Poland and France, but also back in the United States. “ I would love to bring the song cycle to the East Coast to colleges and religious spaces,” she says.

The From the Fever World premier is part of a concert titled “Across Musical Borders,” which also includes a Schulhoff piano-cello duo and a string quartet by Ravel. Dubrow and Bruzdowicz will address the audience before mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, violinists Michele Lekas and
 Renée-Paule Gauthier, violist Doyle Armbrust, cellist
 Mark Lekas and pianist Sung Hoon Mo take to the stage to officially introduce From the Fever-World into the greater world of classical music. For more information, visit http://www.pilgrimplayers.org/.  

New Book by Washington College Historian Explores Lincoln's Racial Attitudes, Political Savvy

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? In his compelling new book, Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press), Washington College history professor Richard Striner weighs the evidence and concludes that, not only was Lincoln free of racial bias, but he also was a political genius willing to deceive his opponents about his racial attitudes in order to further the cause of human rights.

“With lawyerly precision, Richard Striner mines the speeches and writings of our 16th president to make a compelling case for a President Lincoln who, contrary to contemporary belief, had a long and abiding commitment, not just to the end of slavery, but also to equality before the law for all men, whatever the color of their skin,” writes Clay Risen of The New York Times.

The author of five previous books, two of them about Lincoln, Striner has been writing and thinking about the Civil War president since he was a graduate student in history at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s. He says that writing Lincoln and Race gave him a chance to explore in depth one of the themes of his first major work on Lincoln, Father Abraham (Oxford, 2006).

“Was Lincoln, emancipator and champion of liberty, actually a conflicted soul struggling to overcome his own racial prejudice? As I worked my way through the issue in Father Abraham, I thought it quite unlikely for a number of reasons, but most of all because, studying his statecraft and politics, it became clear to me that Lincoln was a moral Machiavellian, an idealist with street smarts,” Striner says.

“Lincoln chose to employ deception a number of times during his White House years, in ways that are easy to document. He had to craft a very careful strategy in order to prevent all sorts of worst-case contingencies, including a white supremacist backlash that would have set back the antislavery cause for God knows how many decades.”

Striner structured Lincoln and Race as a sort of detective yarn, a courtroom drama. He even invokes Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel The Thin Man in his introduction. Assembling the evidence piece by piece, affording all sides of the debate a fair hearing, he has one end in mind: that “any satisfactory theory should make greater sense than the others.”

Striner became fascinated with Lincoln’s statecraft when he was in graduate school, “looking at the past in order to find my own bearings in terms of political philosophy, looking for inspiration. Lincoln struck me powerfully in many ways, not least because of the way he harmonized a great idealism with a very tough realism. Later, when I worked as a grassroots historic preservationist in Washington, I came to appreciate him even more because, trying to summon power to my cause, I realized I was trying at a very low level to do what he did so brilliantly on a grand scale.”

Striner’s habit of mining the past for inspiration has informed his numerous articles, including recent pieces about Lincoln for the popular New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War, and a cover story in The American Scholar in which he urges the administration to consider Lincoln’s strategy of printing greenbacks as a possible cure for contemporary economic woes. His 2011 book, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, examines how Lincoln and five subsequent presidents pushed forward large-scale public projects and policies that made the country great.

Striner is currently working on a book about Woodrow Wilson, who, “unlike Lincoln, was a terrible strategist,” he says. “Wilson was narcissistic and foolish in ways that make him Lincoln’s operational opposite. If democracy is going to work, it demands leadership, and if the world is going to be made better, it will be by people who know how to deliver real results and not just pose on a soapbox demonstrating how perfect they are in their attitudes. That’s nice, but it doesn’t free any slaves.”

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.