W&L Hosts Poet Lauren Camp Camp’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Discovering Baghdad: How Writing My Father’s Story Took Me to the Tigris.”

By Erica Turman
April 24, 2019

Washington and Lee University will host a public reading with poet Lauren Camp on May 13 at 12:30 p.m. in the Hillel Multipurpose Room.

Camp’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Discovering Baghdad: How Writing My Father’s Story Took Me to the Tigris.” A buffet lunch will be provided, and books will be for sale.

“Anyone who thinks about the intersections among food, religion, place and heritage should join us for this event, at which Lauren Camp, a first-generation Arab-American woman, will read poems, talk about her roots in the Middle East and reflect on her relationship with her Jewish-Iraqi father,” said Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English. “Camp’s poetry is gorgeous, full of nuance and heart and her message about careful attention to each other is timely.”

Camp is the author of four poetry collections, most recently “Turquoise Door.” Her third book “One Hundred Hungers,” won the Dorset Prize and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award and the Housatonic Book Award. Camp’s poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Slice, Sixth Finch, New England Review, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Camp’s other honors include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, the RL International Poetry Award and the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. An emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Camp lives and teaches in New Mexico.

Her visit is sponsored in part by the Glasgow Endowment and Hillel.