Poet Hadaway Receives Prestigious Fellowship

AMHERST, VA. – Poet Meredith Davies Hadaway of Chestertown has been awarded a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). Funded by the William G. Sackett Fellowship Endowment, the award will provide a three-week working retreat in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in spring 2012. Hadaway, who serves as Vice President of College Relations and Marketing at Washington College and – occasionally – as an adjunct instructor in English, will focus on her poetry in the company of 25 other artists during her fellowship.

Hadaway has published two volumes, The River is a Reason (January, 2011) and Fishing Secrets of the Dead (2005), both issued by Word Press in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of Hadaway's poems was recently selected by Mark Doty for honorable mention in the 2010 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize. Another was chosen for inclusion in Best Millennium Writings Awards. She has received two Pushcart nominations and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. In addition to publishing poetry in numerous literary journals, she is a frequent contributor of book reviews to Poetry International and serves as poetry editor for The Summerset Review.

Hadaway also is an avid musician who has combined poetry and Celtic harp in performances around the U.S. and Ireland. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an M.A. in Psychology from Washington College, and a B.A. in English Literature from American University.

The VCCA is one of the nation's largest year-round artists’ communities and has served more than 4,000 artists since its inception in 1971. It provides lodging, meals, and an undistracted environment where visual artists, writers, composers, performance artists, filmmakers and other collaborative artists can focus on their work.

Previous VCCA Fellows have received worldwide attention through publications, exhibitions, compositions, performances, and have earned major awards and accolades, including MacArthur grants, Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts awards, Rome Prizes, Pollock-Krasner grants, National Book Awards, Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, and Academy Award nominations.

Hadaway Reads Poetry at Spoleto Festival

CHARLESTON, S.C.—Washington College's Vice President for College Relations and Marketing, Meredith Davies Hadaway, participated in Charleston’s prestigious Spoleto Festival on June 3, reading from her new book of poems, The River is a Reason. She was part of the Sundown Poetry Series, organized by the city’s Piccolo Spoleto, a companion festival that highlights outstanding local and regional artists during the 17-day run of the Spoleto Festival.

“I was honored to be part of a festival that has cultivated such an enthusiastic and dedicated audience for poetry,” says Hadaway of her reading, where listeners filled the brick courtyard of Charleston’s historic Dock Street Theatre.

Published in January by Word Press, The River Is a Reason is Hadaway’s second book of poetry. One poem in the collection was selected by the distinguished poet Mark Doty for honorable mention in the 2010 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry contest. Two others were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. A fourth received honorable mention in the New Millennium Writings awards. This year Hadaway also received an Individual Artist Award from The Maryland State Arts Council.

"As they balance between the everyday and the mysterious, as they flow between praise and lament, these poems are dignified throughout by a master’s feel for sentence and line,” poet Peter Campion, editor of Literary Imagination, the journal of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, wrote of the collection.

Hadaway, says her muse and preoccupation is the Chester River. “I live 30 feet from the river and it permeates everything I do,” she says. “The tide is an amazing pulse and provides a rhythm to your day. If you live where I do, where the water is not very deep, you are always aware of it. I love that the river goes away, and thatit comes back again.”

She says that the title of her collection, though it seems a declarative statement, is really a question. In the book’s final poem, “Why the River,” she seems to answer it: “because it traps the clouds so we can sail across/ both heaven and earth/ because it carries our tears, swells/ with our salt/ because it is a body/ because it bears our weight.”

Washington College Unveils New Home Page, October 1

Chestertown, MD — A new home page slated to launch October 1 aligns current navigation menus in a structure consistent with the rest of the site. The introduction of new channels for dynamic content enables us to showcase more features about students, faculty, and alumni.

The site was designed by the Office of College Relations with the guidance of the Web Advisory Council. The continuous input of students, faculty, and staff remains critical to the ongoing evolution of the site. Please send feedback about the new home design to Web Editor Shane Brill at sbrill2@washcoll.edu.

Key Features of the Site

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  Streamlined coding that loads quickly and provides nuanced customization within a common layout. For examples of how CSS works within the site template, compare the stylized appearances of Center for Environment & Society, Zeta Tau Alpha, and theOffice of Information Technologies.
• Dynamic Content
  Randomly loading content is placed on relevant pages to provide unique visitor experiences. New site mastheads, event photo teasers, and home page feature storiesare being regularly introduced.
• Standards-compliance
  The Washington College site meets standards for valid coding by the World Wide Web Consortium, better known as W3C. This is important for cross-browser compatibility and development of Web applications. The site also meets Section 508 guidelines for accessibility.
• Web Applications
  Keywords embedded throughout the site are continuously refined for more effective external and internal search queries in conjunction with lighter coding. Visitors can also subscribe to the calendar of events, get personalized driving directions, scan condensed content quickly, and explore local destinations through embedded map links.

September 27, 2007