Feature Stories Campus Events All Stories

Reading and Panel Discussion to be Held In Celebration of New Anthology

Poetry and Community in the South: A Reading and Panel Discussion will be presented by Washington and Lee University on Thursday, Feb. 28, from 4-5:30 p.m. in Elrod Commons room 345. The event is in celebration of a just-published anthology, Letters to the World: Poems from the Women’s Poetry Listserv, edited by Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace and Lesley Wheeler, professor of English at W&L.

The event is free and open to the public.

Participants include Jean Anaporte-Easton, Julie Enszer, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Sally Rosen Kindred, Cheryl Pallant, Susan Settlemyre Williams and Susan Williamson and will be moderated by Lesley Wheeler.

Letters to the World is the first anthology of its kind – a feminist collaboration born from The Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv, a vibrant, inclusive, electronic community founded in 1997 by Annie Finch. The book presents a rich array of viewpoints and poems and provides a remarkable example of how the Internet has radically rearranged associations among poets, editors and readers. It includes 259 contributors from 19 countries and five continents.

Anaport-Easton, a professor of English at West Virginia State University, has published most recently in Poiesis and 13th Moon, and has taught poetry in universities, schools, prisons and mental health facilities. Enszer, a writer and poet living in Maryland, has been published in Room of One’s Own and The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, among other journals. Fisher- Wirth, the author of two poetry collections, Five Terraces and Blue Window, teaches at the University of Mississippi where she specializes in poetry and the environment and Chatham University’s MFA program in Creative Writing.

Kindred is the author of Garnet Lanterns, winner of the 2005 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest, and received the 2007 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poetry Southeast and Passages North, among other journals. Pallant is the author of several books, including Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form. Her most recent poetry collection is Into Stillness. A writer, dancer and performing artist, she teaches at the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Williams, the author of Ashes in Midair, is the winner of the 2007 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest. Her poem “Lighter” won the 2006 Diner Poetry Contest and was selected for Best New Poets 2006. She is book review editor and associate literary editor of Blackbird and lives in Richmond. Williamson’s work has appeared in Three Candles, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Story South. She is assistant director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and editor in chief of Streetlight magazine and lives in Charlottesville and Boca Raton, Fla.

The reading and panel discussion is co-sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment, which was established by the late Arthur G. Glasgow for the “promotion of the expression of art through pen and tongue,” W&L’s Women’s Studies Program and University Lectures.