W&L Professor Featured by Graywolf Press in 50th Anniversary Anthology Leah Naomi Green’s essay on Kaveh Akbar’s poem “The Miracle” is anthologized in “Raised by Wolves.”

By Brian Laubscher
September 26, 2023

Leah Naomi Green, visiting assistant professor of English and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University, will have her latest essay featured in Graywolf Press’s “Raised By Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems,” an anthology of 50 Graywolf poets who have each selected a poem, offering insightful prose reflections on their selections.

“How strange and wonderful to be anthologized among my own favorite poets – many of the most significant poets of our time are included here,” said Green. “It’s an honor to share pages with them.”

Green’s essay is the first featured and addresses Kaveh Akbar’s poem “The Miracle.” Her work will be celebrated with a reading alongside Akbar at a release event for the book on Jan. 27.

Graywolf Press is the nation’s leading independent poetry publisher, consistently publishing winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. Graywolf was the publisher of Green’s debut book of poems titled “The More Extravagant Feast,” which won the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the nation’s most prestigious prize first-book prize for poetry.

Many of Green’s poems were recently anthologized in “The Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia,” showcasing significant Virginian poets from the state’s founding to present day. She will be featured in another reading for that anthology, along with Rita Dove, Charles Wright and others, on Oct. 19 at the University of Virginia.

A visiting member of the W&L faculty since 2009, Green’s poems and essays have been further anthologized in the last year in “The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy,” “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them,” “Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World,” and “The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal.”

If you know a W&L faculty member who has done great, accolade-worthy things, tell us about them! Nominate them for an accolade.