English Department: St. Mary's College of Maryland

Lucille Clifton 1936–2010

Events & Readings

Program Information

Ben Click, Chair
Professor of English
240-895-4253
baclick@smcm.edu

Office staff: 240-895-4225

Alumni—where are they now?

Karyn Sailstad (class of 2007) graduated with an English major and a minor in Studio Art. She currently lives in Bath, England, where she is pursuing a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and interning with the children’s publisher Barefoot Books.

Student spotlight

Second-year student Michele Johnson will be having a poem she wrote for her ENGL 270 class last spring published professionally in the Ampersand Review.

Events

Please join us in welcoming the visiting writers featured in 2009–2010's VOICES reading series:

		Alicia Shandra Holmes Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Alicia Shandra Holmes has published fiction in The Bitter Oleander, Rosebud, CRATE, Many Mountains Moving, and The Blue Earth Review. She was a resident at the Sanskriti Kendra cultural center in New Delhi, India, funded through the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Programme, and the recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for nonfiction. She received her B.A. in English/Community Journalism from Western Michigan University and her M.F.A. from the University of Alabama. She lives in Lansing, Michigan, where she works as a Library Information Commons Specialist.

		E. Ethelbert Miller Thursday, October 15, 2009 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist. He is board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank located in Washington, D.C. Since 1974, Mr. Miller has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. The author of several collections of poems, his book, How We Sleep On The Nights We Don't Make Love (Curbston Press) was an Independent Publisher Award Finalist. It was also on the Poetry Foundation's best seller list. In 2003 Miller's memoir Fathering Words: The Making of An African American Writer (St. Martin's Press) was selected by DC WE READ for its one book, one city program. In March 2009, Busboys and Poets Press released his second memoir, The 5th Inning. Mr. Miller is often heard on National Public Radio (NPR).

		A Writer's Harvest Reading Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Students of JCB’s “Books that Cook” class and other Fabulous Foodies will share recipe recollections, food fictions, and a veritable cornucopia of potluck cuisine, cooked out of favorite foodie books. Recommended donation of $5.00; all proceeds will go to Food and Water Watch.

		Laurie Clements Lambeth Thursday, November 19, 2009 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Laurie Clements Lambeth’s debut poetry collection, Veil and Burn, was selected by Pulitzer prize winner Maxine Kumin for the National Poetry Series. Kumin writes that in the poems Lambeth “is both lyrical and pragmatic, nostalgic and tough-minded.” Laurie has lived with multiple sclerosis for over twenty years, and it has affected her sense if touch, movement and vision. Her poetry seeks ways to understand the subtleties of these symptoms, and how they correspond to the world, locating common ground between humans and animals: sensation. Mark Doty writes that she “understands that the crisis facing the speaker in this indelible book—the dawning struggles of MS, which troubles the nerves and veils and burns the vision—is an intensification of what it is to be any body, the edge-of-crisis on which we all dwell. [ . . . ] With courage and formal acuity, humor and tenderness, Lambeth ‘veils and burns’ a moving debut, a suite of poems that are forthright, adult, and entirely humane.” An MFA and PhD graduate of the University of Houston’s creative writing program, where she was awarded Barthelme and Michener fellowships, Lambeth has seen her poetry and creative nonfiction published in The Paris Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. A California native, she currently lives, writes and teaches in Houston, where she is developing a book of creative nonfiction.

		Debra Marquart Thursday, January 28, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Debra Marquart is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. Her books include two poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories which draws on her experiences as a road musician. Marquart is a member of The Bone People, a jazz-poetry, rhythm & blue project, with whom she has released two CDs: Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was awarded the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart’s work has also received a Pushcart Prize, the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize from the Faulkner Society, the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine, and a National Endowment for the Arts Prose Fellowship. She’s currently at work on a novel, set in Greece, titled Among the Ruins.

		Barbara Hurd Thursday, February 11, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (2008), Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year (2003), The Singer's Temple (2003), Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 (2001), and Objects in this Mirror (1994). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays 1999, Best American Essays 2001, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, and others. The recipient of a 2002 NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award and Pushcart Prizes in 2004 and 2007, she teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, MD, and in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

		Jerry Gabriel Thursday, February 25, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Jerry Gabriel is the author of Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy prize in 2008 (Sarabande Press, forthcoming). He holds degrees from The Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked as a science writer and taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including, from 2001-2008, as a lecturer in Cornell University’s Engineering Communications Program. Since the fall of 2008, he has been a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, Cimarron Review, The Tampa Review, and Fiction, among other magazines, and has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize. In 2004, he was awarded an artist grant by the New York Foundation for the Arts.

		Jonathan Bennett Thursday, March 11, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Jonathan Bennett's latest book is Entitlement: a novel. He is the author of three previous books including the critically acclaimed novel After Battersea Park, a book of poetry, Here is my street, this tree I planted, and a collection of short stories, Verandah People, which was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best first collection of stories by a Canadian author. He was the winner of the 2008 K.M. Hunter Artists' Award in Literature. Jonathan Bennett's other writing has appeared in many periodicals and journals including: The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature, and Descant. Born in Vancouver, raised in Sydney, Australia, Jonathan lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

		Lee K. Abbott Thursday, April 15, 2010 8:15 PM, St. Mary’s Hall Lee K. Abbott is the author of seven collections of short stories, most recently All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories (Norton). His fiction has appeared in nearly one hundred periodicals, including Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Epoch, The Southern Review, and Boulevard. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards: The Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize series. Twice a winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has published essays and reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

		Bruce Cohen Thursday, April 29, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Bruce Cohen’s poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals including AGNI Online, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly; his poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A 2007 recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, he has published two collections of poems, Swerve (Black Lawrence Press), and Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize.

		Alex Dimitrov Thursday, May 6, 2010 8:15 PM, Daugherty-Palmer Commons Alex Dimitrov is the recipient of a Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship from the Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan. He earned his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His poems and reviews have appeared in Poets & Writers, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, and Poet Lore among others. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, he lives and writes in New York City.