Writer-in-Residence Poetry Reading to be March 1
The 7th Annual Washington and Lee University Writer-in-Residence Poetry Reading, featuring Lesley Wheeler, John Leland and R.T. Smith, will be March 1 at 12 p.m. in Hillel House, room 101.
The poetry reading is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the College, the Glasgow Endowment and Shenandoah.
Wheeler, the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at W&L, has written six poetry collections and two scholarly books including “Radioland” (2015); “The Receptionist and Other Tales” (2012); “Heterotopia” (2012); and “Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present” (2008). Recent work has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone and Poetry.
She has held fellowships from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities and other grantors. Wheeler has won numerous awards and honors for her work. In 2012, she also won an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia.
Leland recently retired from the English Department at W&L where he taught literature and creative writing. A native of coastal South Carolina, he has lived in the Shenandoah Valley for 30 years and writes in poetry and essays about his experiences there.
“Learning the Valley” (2010); “Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports into America” (2005); and “Porcher’s Creek: Lives between the Tides” (2001) are among his non-fiction books about landscape, flora, fauna and culture. His collection of poetry is “Fireflies.”
Smith, editor of Shenandoah and W&L’s writer-in-residence, he has also served as writer-in-residence at VMI, Auburn, Converse and Appalachian State. He has received the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry twice and was awarded the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize in 2014.
His most recent collections of poetry are “In the Night Orchard: New and Selected Poems” (2014) “The Red Wolf: A Dream of Flannery O’Connor” (2013); and “Sherburne: Stories” (2011). He has published in various journals including Asheville Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Humanities Review.
