Poet Dora Malech to Read at Lit House Nov. 17

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Poet and artist Dora Malech will read from her collections at the Rose O’Neill Literary House on Thursday, November 17. The reading, part of the English Department’s “Living Writers” course, begins at 4:30 and is free and open to the public.

In a review of Malech’s 2009 debut poetry book, Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press), writer Bill Mahire wrote, “Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She’s far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation.”

Malech’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, The Yale Review and other publications. She has received numerous writing fellowships, including a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship.

Malech has been both a participant and an instructor at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A native of Bethesda, Md., she now lives in Iowa City, IA, where she coordinates the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.

For more information: http://lithouse.washcoll.edu/.

Poet H.L. Hix to Read at Lit House Nov. 3

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College will welcome poet H.L. Hix to the Rose O’Neill Literary House on Thursday, November 3. His poetry reading, part of the English Department’s “Living Writers” course, will begin at 4:30 p.m.

“H.L. Hix is that rare poet who is equal parts historian, journalist, archivist, and singer,” said fellow poet and poetry critic Susan M. Schultz. One reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly wrote of Hix’s work, “Sometimes achingly beautiful, sometimes grisly and violent, and sometimes tersely intellectual, Hix’s collections have always been hard to forget.”

Hix’s poetry has been published in many national journals, including Harvard Review, Poetry, and McSweeney’s. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has won prestigious poetry awards such as the Grolier and the T.S. Eliot Prizes.

Hix’s 2006 collection Chromatic (Etruscan Press) was a National Book Award finalist for poetry.

A professor of creative writing at the University of Wyoming, he has also served as a visiting professor at Shanghai University and at the University of Texas. His Nov. 3 reading at Washington College is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and is free and open to the public.

Visiting Poet Mixes the Erotic and the Divine

CHESTERTOWN, MD—As a part of the English Department’s “Living Writers” course, poet Jill Alexander Essbaum will read from her collections at the Rose O’Neill Literary House on Thursday, October 27. The reading, which begins at 4:30, is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee.

Billed on her website as “Christian and erotic poetry,” Essbaum’s writing combines unique and unexpected elements, including sex and divinity, with wordplay. Critic G.M. Palmer has said no other poet today “dares play with such spiritual fire … Her poems skirt on the edge of blasphemy and pray for re-readings.”

Of her own work, Essbaum says, “I write a lot of awfully laudatory verses praising many things that religion tends to traditionally condemn. It isn’t lost on me that I’m writing about acts that just a few centuries ago might have got me hanged. But we don’t live in a regime where our poems can land us in the same hot waters as other poets from different lands or from other eras do or did.”

Essbaum’s poems have appeared in national journals, including Poetry, Image, and The Christian Century, and her debut collection, Heaven, won the 1999 Bakeless Prize, an annual book series competition for burgeoning authors. She has since published two additional collections, Harlot (2007) and Necropolis (2008). She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.