FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Press Release/MEDIA ADVISORY #08-225

VOICES Presents Essayist Jeffrey Hammond’s Latest Book, Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age
Thursday, Dec. 4, 8:00 P.M. at SMCM

(St. Mary’s City, MD) Nov. 24, 2008— Essayist Jeffrey Hammond will read from his latest book, Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age, on Thursday, Dec. 4, at 8:00 p.m. in Daugherty-Palmer Commons at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM).  The last English Department-sponsored VOICES reading series of the semester will present Hammond’s newest collection of essays which explores the amusements and anxieties of being no longer young but not (yet) old.  This event is free and open to the public.  For more information, contact Karen Anderson at 240-895-2107 or klanderson@smcm.edu.

Hammond, the George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts, has had his work appear in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Potomac Review, ISLE, Chattahoochee Review, Clackamas Literary Review, River Styx, Ohio Magazine, Notre Dame Magazine, and American Scholar, among others. His creative nonfiction has won a Pushcart Prize, Shenandoah’s Carter Prize for essay, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize for essay, and has been cited several times in the Pushcart annual and Best American Essays. His collection of essays about life in small-town Ohio, entitled Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern (Kent State University Press, 2002), was one of two finalists for an Independent Publisher Book Award in the essays/creative nonfiction category. He also wrote This Place Where We Are (St. Mary’s Press, 2006), a series of reflections on St. Mary’s College and its liberal arts mission.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and Kiplinger’s. Founded in 1840 as Maryland’s “monument school” commemorating the state’s first capital, SMCM is the state’s only public honors college, offering “an Ivy-level College with a public-school price tag” (Newsweek).

Some 2,000 students attend the college, which has the highest graduation rate for all Maryland public colleges and universities, and an SAT average for student admissions of 1252. The school’s waterfront campus along the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland is home to the 2007 National Intercollegiate Sailing Association Women’s, Sloop and Team champions.

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Photo: St. Mary’s College of Maryland English professor and essayist, Jeffrey Hammond