Poet and Memoirist Jan Beatty to Give Glasgow Endowment Reading at W&L The public reading will take place March 6 at 6 p.m. in Northen Auditorium.

By Emily Innes
February 20, 2024

Washington and Lee University presents a public reading with poet and memoirist Jan Beatty on March 6 at 6 p.m. in the Northen Auditorium inside Leyburn Library. The event is sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment.

“Jan Beatty’s poetry knocks the breath out of me,” said Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English and poetry editor of W&L’s Shenandoah literary magazine. “In book after prize-winning book, she refuses fear even as she confronts, with amazing clarity, the most powerful threats to our bodies and identities. I’ve wanted to bring her to campus for a long time, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally happening.”

Beatty’s eighth book, “Dragstripping,” explores the restricted roles and burdens placed on women by a culture unwilling to complicate the idea of gender and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press later this year. Her 2021 memoir “American Bastard” won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award, and other recent works include “The Body Wars” (2020), “Skydog” (2022), and “Jackknife: New and Selected Poems” (2017), which won the 2018 Paterson Prize. Beatty’s work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, North American Review and Best American Poetry. She has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, an Artists Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, a Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, and was a finalist for the Discovery/The Nation Prize.

Beatty is a Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she was the director of the creating writing program, director of the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and distinguished writer in residence of the university’s MFA program. She received her bachelor’s degree in social work from West Virginia University and her MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.