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.

Yeats Scholar to Lecture at O'Neill Literary House

Georgie and William Butler Yeats in 1923.

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Scholar Meg Harper will lecture on the poet W.B. Yeats and his wife, Georgie, when she visits the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College on Monday, November 19. Her talk, “Spiritual Committee Work: The Yeatses and A Vision,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public as part of the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series.

            Dr. Harper is a specialist in Irish literature, literary modernism and twentieth-century poetry who has studied the life and work of W.B. Yeats extensively. Her book Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats (Oxford 2006) discusses the often marginalized role of Yeats’s wife in his life and the couple’s shared fascination with the occult.
            Harper, who co-edited Yeats’ series of “Vision” papers for Macmillan (1992 and 2001), holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently the Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick, in Ireland. 

            The Literary House is located at 407 Washington Avenue. 

Novelist Solomon and Songwriter Burson Collaborate for Special "Jewish Voices" Event

Singer/songwriter Clare Burson. 

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Novelist Anna Solomon and singer-songwriter Clare Burson will perform together at Washington College on Tuesday, November 13 as part of the “Jewish Voices” series sponsored by the Rose O’Neill Literary House. The event will take place in the Egg, Hodson Hall Commons, at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. A book and CD signing will follow.

Anna Solomon is the author of The Little Bride (Riverhead Books, 2011), as well as many short stories and essays. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Harvard Review, and many other publications. She has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and was awarded two Pushcart Prizes and an Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review.

Writer Anna Solomon.

 A former journalist for National Public Radio, she reported and produced award-winning environmental stories for the program Living On Earth. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Her novel, The Little Bride, tells the story of a teenaged mail-order bride from Russia who is sent to the South Dakota prairie in the late 1800s to wed an older Orthodox man and share his sod hut.

A Tennessee-born musician now living in New York, Clare Burson has won praise for her fresh version of contemporary folk music, often tinged with melancholy. Her latest album, Silver and Ash, released in 2010 by Rounder Records, is a collection of songs inspired by her ancestors’ experiences in the Holocaust. 

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus observed, “In Silver and Ash, 28 years of questioning, studying and mourning have been channeled into song, yielding an unusual cultural hybrid: an American album of popular music devoted to the theme of the Holocaust. … Tunes that could accompany hard-knock American love stories are laced, instead, with references to trunks and train platforms, a piano at a picture window, candles burning down — European worlds and the ways they were lost or saved, details she gleaned from her grandmother and in her research.”

Solomon contacted Burson, a fellow Brown University alumna, to collaborate on a project that would feature songs based on The Little Bride. In an interview with music blog largehearted boy, both women said working together allowed them to reach new levels of emotional depth in their work. After hearing one of Burson’s musical takes on her work, Solomon recalls, “I felt my character’s sorrow – her deep, primal missing of her mother – more than I ever had while I was writing the book.” Burson, in turn, says that in reading Solomon’s work, “I was able to experience it, be moved by it, and then let the songs grow out of that.” The two artists’ collaboration results in a moving performance that is part reading, part music.

The third and final event of the “Jewish Voices” series will be a poetry reading by Idra Novey on December 4. For more information on the series and other Literary House programming, visit http://lithouse.washcoll.edu.