Events

Come join us for the first-year reading of Class of 2029! Poetry, prose, and everything in between!

Join us for the 17th annual Kent County Poetry Festival, keynoted by Jericho Brown!

Events will be added, and more information will be available on the Kent Cultural Alliance's website: kentculture.org/poetryfest

The Poetry Festival is co-sponsored by the Kent Cultural Alliance, the Rose O'Neill Literary House, the BookPlate, and Robert Ortiz Studios.

Celebrate the Class of 2026 by coming out to hear them read! In addition to hearing their talent, come one come all to hear the winners of the Warner Prize, the Genre Fiction Prize, and the Pfister Prize.

Literary House Series Presents:

A Literary House Senior Reading!

Wednesday, April 23, 5:00PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

SENIOR READING

Literary House Series Presents: Andrew Mozina

Wednesday, April 9, 6:00PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Andrew Mozina

Click here to stream.

Kent County Poetry Festival Presents: Denise Duhamel

Saturday, April 5, 7:00PM ET
Garfield Center for the Arts

Sunday, April 6, 2:00PM ET
Bob Ortiz Studios

A Weekend of Literary Festivities

A Cherry Tree Launch: Cherry Tree Issue 11 Contributor Reading

Wednesday, March 5, 7:00 PM ET
Zoom
A Cherry Tree Issue 11 Launch Reading

Literary House Series Presents: A Reading and Generative Workshop by Christopher Tilghman

Wednesday, February 26, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Christopher Tilghman Reads from his Fiction.

Click here to stream.

Thursday, February 27, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
A Generative Workshop with Christopher Tilghman.

Click here to stream.

Literary House Series Presents: A Fiction Reading and Generative Workshop by R. O. Kwon

Wednesday, January 29, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
R.O. Kwon Reads from her Fiction.

Click here to stream.

Thursday, January 30, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
A Generative Workshop with R. O. Kwon.

Literary House Series Presents:

The Class of 2028 First Year Reading

FIRST-YEAR READING

Thursday, November 21, 5:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.

Come hear original creative works by members of the class of 2028!

What a Self Could Be: Poetry and Mental Health
A workshop and reading with Diane Seuss

Sponsored by the Small Literary Arts Centers Coalition

Co-sponsored by Washington College's Center for Teaching & Learning

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Monday, November 18, 6:00 PM ET
Zoom

Please Welcome Diane Seuss (Virtually) to Washington College.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Rajiv Mohabir

Co-sponsored by both the Sophie Kerr Committee & the Center for Environment and Society

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Wednesday, November 13, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Rajiv Mohabir Reads From His Poetry.

Click here to stream.

Thursday, November 14, 2:30 PM ET
Lawrence Wetlands Preserve
A Workshop Guided by Rajiv Mohabir.

Kiplin Hall Student Reading and Information Session

Co-sponsored by the English Department, the Starr Center, and CES

Thursday, Nov 7, 5:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Kiplin Hall Student Reading and Informational

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Diannely Antigua

Co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee

Wednesday, October 23, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
So You Want to Make a Podcast? With Diannely Antigua.

Click here to stream.

Thursday, October 24, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Diannely Antigua Reading From Her Poetry

Click here to stream.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Carl Phillips

Co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee

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Tuesday, October 1, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
God's Lioness: Carl Phillips on Sylvia Plath.

Click here to stream.

Wednesday, October 2, 7:00 PM ET
Hotchkiss Theater
Carl Phillips Reads From His Work.
Book Sale and Signing to Follow.

Click here to stream.

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.

Tuesday, September 17, 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.
Come meet the new Director and Curator of the Kohl Gallery, Robert Blackson. A short Q&A with Professor Julie Wills precedes a reception.

Tuesday, September 10, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.
Cameron Awkward-Rich Reads From His Poetry
Book Sale and Signing to Follow.

Click here to stream.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His creative work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.

Also a scholar of trans theory and expressive culture in the U.S., Awkward-Rich earned his PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought & Literature. His more critical writing can be found in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Duke University's program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the ACLS. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment was published by Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Presently, he is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Monday, February 5, 7:00 PM ET
Virtual.

WHAT MAKES GREAT WRITERS! A talk with Dr. Elizabeth O'Connor, Associate Professor, English Department

Tuesday, February 6, 6:00 PM ET
The Egg.

A Book Talk with Natalie Martiniatis.

Wednesday, February 7, 7:00 PM ET
Virtual.

Elizabeth Chandler, Screenwriter of the SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS talks about her career.

Thursday, February 8, 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.

Cara Koontz '15 Career Talk

Friday, February 9, 12:30 PM ET

Trivia Contest Gift Card Drawing!

Tuesday, September 5, 2:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.

ADAPT!: Writer Amy Güth leds a craft talk on taking literature from the page to the big screen.

Wednesday, September 6, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House.

PRODUCE!: Producer Amy Güth reveals the secrets behind the least-understood job in Hollywood.

Amy Güth is an award-winning screenwriter ("Open Road," "A Thousand Cuts," "The Mender," among others) and producer, having most recently produced "Elvis of the Yukon" and "La Mitad Del Mundo," a Spanish-language documentary about sex trafficking in Ecuador, playing now in film festivals. In addition to her novel, Three Fallen Women (2016), Güth's fiction, journalism, and commentary have appeared widely. Güth was Executive Director of the Midwest Independent Film Festival, publisher of Tribune Publishing Company's RedEye, and founder of Pilcrow Lit Fest in Chicago. She has served as President of the Board of Directors at Bitch Media as well as President of the Association for Women Journalists.

Monday, September 18, 7:00 PM ET
Norman James Theater

Screening of Love and Friendship followed by a talkback/Q&A with screenwriter Whit Stillman.

Tuesday, September 19, 4:00 PM ET

A Craft Talk on Screenwriting with Whit Stillman.

Jonterri Gadson is a former creative writing professor who chose TV over tenure. Her most recent credits include Everybody Still Hates Chris and Netflix's The Upshaws. She received an Emmy noination for her work on HBO's A Black Lady Sketch Show. She won Kevin Hart's LOL Film Fellowship for a short she wrote/directed and premiered at the American Black Film Festival. Her pilot script won Best Comedy Script at the New York Television Festival where she won development deals with OneX and Topic Studios. She's an alum of the NBC Late Night Writers Workshop, New York Stage & Filmmakers Lab, Refinery29 & TBS Riot Comedy Writers Lab and the IFP Project Forum. Her full-length poetry collection is Blues Triumphant (YesYes Books).

James Allen Hall is the author most recently of Romantic Comedy. Their other books are Now You're the Enemy (poems) and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (lyric personal essays). They are the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. They direct the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, where they serve as Associate Professor of English and Editor of Cherry Tree, a national literary magazine.

Thursday, November 9, 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Screening and Talkback with Novelist and Screenwriter Ron Currie, Jr.

Monday, April 25, 2022 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Wednesday, April 13, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Sigrid Nunez Reads from Her Fiction

Thursday, April 14, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Sigrid Nunez Leads a Generative Fiction Workshop

Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It was also a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez's other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. This year she was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Tuesday, March 1, 2021 6:00 PM ET
Virtual

Claudia Rankine in Conversation with Garrett Bradley

Rankine and Bradley share their work briefly before entering into a moderated discussion. This is a collaboration between the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Stadler Center at Bucknell University, and the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Monday, November 29, 2021 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

The Annual First-Year Reading

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

Tuesday, November 3, 2021 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading by Robert Macfarlane

Wednesday, November 4, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Generative Workshop with Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and The Lost Words, co-created with Jackie Morris. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.

Thursday, September 23, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

The Science of Poetry/The Poetry of Science

At its heart, writing and science share the same common goal: discovery and meaning. How can writing creatively benefit from the methodologies and insights that science can bring? How can scientific knowledge be enhanced by the art of language? This workshop is designed for intellectually curious people--those who identify as scientists and those that identify as writers, though those things do not need to overlap.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading and Discussion of New England Review

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Generative Poetry Workshop

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012, 2016, and 2020. Barot is the poetry editor of New England Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in February 2020.

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Kathryn Nuernberger

Wednesday, March 10, 2021 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Writing as Ritual Act: A Craft Talk

Kathryn Nuernberger's third poetry collection, Rue, was published in 2020 (BOA). The End of Pink (BOA, 2016), which won the 2015 James Laughlin prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011), which won the 2010 Antivenom Prize. A collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (Ohio State University Press, 2017), won the Non/Fiction Prize from The Journal. She teaches in the MFA Program at University of Minnesota. She has received grants from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

Thursday, February 4, 2021 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Lily Hoang

Lily Hoang is the author of five books of prose, including Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award) and A Bestiary (winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Non-Fiction Book Prize). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. In Summer 2017, she was Mellon Scholar in Residence at Rhodes University in South Africa. She is Editor of Jaded Ibis Press and Executive Editor of HTML Giant.

Monday, January 27, 2021 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

So You Want to Submit a Sophie Kerr Prize Portfolio?: An Informational Session

Led by Professors James Allen Hall and Sean Meehan, this brief informational session is designed for graduating seniors who are preparing to submit Sophie Kerr Prize portfolios in spring 2021. The session will cover the guidelines for submitting a portfolio and offer helpful advice about constructing a portfolio that highlights each writer's strengths.

Monday, November 23, 2020 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

The Annual First-Year Reading

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Poetry and Nonfiction Reading by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

The Writer's Life and Beyond

This will not be a traditional reading. Instead, this will be a moderated conversation, in honor of Bob's retirement, about how writers build relationships with their publishers and vice versa, what it means to be a literary publisher in the 21st century, etc.

Monday, October 19, 2020 5:00 PM ET
Hynson Lounge

How to Think Like Shakespeare

A graduate of Grinnell College and Harvard University, Scott Newstok teaches literature of the English Renaissance as well as film, rhetoric, education, lyric poetry, and the humanities at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, where he is also the Founding Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment. He has published books on Kenneth Burke's Shakespeare criticism, early modern English epitaphs, a collection of essays on Macbeth and race (co-edited with Ayanna Thompson), and most recently, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton University Press, 2020) which distills vital habits of mind that can help you think more deeply, write more effectively, and learn more joyfully, in school or beyond. Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, praises "Scott Newstok's book, a playful delight, also delivers a serious pedagogical punch."

Thursday, October 8, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Virtual

A Nonfiction Reading with Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin's Press 2010) and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which The New Yorker called “mesmerizing,” and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Triangle Publishing Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, The Cut, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Bustle, Refinery29, Salon, The Rumpus, and others. Her second essay collection will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including The Believer, Tin House, Sewanee Review, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, Vogue, Dissent, The New York Time Book Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University, where she directs the MFA program.

Thursday, October 1, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Hynson Lounge

A Conversation with Casey Cep and Elaine Weiss

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. Her first book is Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Knopf, 2019). A proud graduate of the Talbot County Public Schools, she has an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Elaine Weiss is a Baltimore-based journalist and author, whose feature writing has been recognized with prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists, and her byline has appeared in many national publications. Her long-form writing garnered a Pushcart Prize “Editor's Choice” award, and she is a proud MacDowell Colony Fellow. Weiss' most recent book, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote has won critical acclaim from the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and The New Yorker, hailed as a “riveting, nail-biting political thriller” with powerful parallels to today's political environment. The Woman's Hour was a GoodReads Readers' Choice Award winner, short-listed for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and received the American Bar Association's highest honor, the 2019 Silver Gavel Award. Steven Speilberg's Amblin production company is adapting the book for TV, with Hillary Rodham Clinton serving as Executive Producer.

Tuesday, September 8, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Virtual

A Nonfiction Reading with Sarah Manguso

Wednesday, September 9, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Virtual

A Workshop with Sarah Manguso

Born and raised near Boston, writer Sarah Manguso earned her BA at Harvard University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her books include the poetry collections Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002); the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007); the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), selected as an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review; and the hybrid-genre book The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend (2012). Her work has been featured in several volumes of The Best American Poetry.

Friday, September 4, 2020 6:00 PM ET
Virtual

A Film Screening of Persepolis

Based on the autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis was directed by Marjane Satrapi in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud and follows the coming of age story of a young girl against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Come hear graduating senior writers read from their original pieces. The Literary House will also announce the winners of the Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, the William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and the Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.

Thursday, April 14, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading by the 2020 Mary Wood Fellow

Friday, April 15, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Craft Talk by the 2020 Mary Wood Fellow

Kathryn Nuernberger's third poetry collection, Rue, is forthcoming in Spring 2020 (BOA). The End of Pink (BOA, 2016), which won the 2015 James Laughlin prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Rag & Bone (Elixir, 2011), which won the 2010 Antivenom Prize. A collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (Ohio State University Press, 2017), won the Non/Fiction Prize from The Journal. She teaches in the MFA Program at University of Minnesota. She has received grants from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

Thursday, April 2, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Jonathan Segal in conversation with Paul Hendrickson

Jonathan Segal is a 1966 graduate of Washington College, where he majored in English and took courses in creative writing. He is now Vice President and Senior Editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York City. He has edited seven Pulitzer Prize-winning books, and his authors include Paul Hendrickson, Arthur Ashe, Elie Wiesel, and Tony Blair, among others.

Paul Hendrickson teaches writing workshops in advanced nonfiction as Senior Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Provost's teaching award in 2005. He worked for over 30 years in daily journalism, including as a staff feature writer at the Washington Post. He is the author of 7 books, including the forthcoming Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright. His book, Hemingway's Boat, was published by Knopf in 2011 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won The Chicago Tribune's annual Heartland Prize. His previous book, Sons of Mississippi (also from Knopf) won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Heartland Prize. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA. He has degrees in English from St. Louis University and Penn State.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Nonfiction Reading by Casey Cep

Casey Cep reads from her debut work of creative nonfiction, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. Her first book is Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Knopf, 2019). A proud graduate of the Talbot County Public Schools, she has an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Poetry Reading with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil will read from her poetry as part of the Editors as Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

Writers as Editors Series Presents:

Kate Bernheimer

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Thursday, February 6, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Kate Bernheimer

Kate Bernheimer will read from her fiction as part of the Editors as Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Sophie Kerr Prize Informational

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Monday, January 27, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

So You Want to Submit a Sophie Kerr Prize Portfolio?: An Informational Session

Led by Professors James Allen Hall and Sean Meehan, this brief informational session is designed for graduating seniors who are preparing to submit Sophie Kerr Prize portfolios in spring 2020. The session will cover the guidelines for submitting a portfolio and offer helpful advice about constructing a portfolio that highlights each writer's strengths.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Monica Ferrell

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Monday, January 27, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Poetry Reading and Q&A With Monica Ferrell.

Monica Ferrell will read from her poetry, and take audience questions afterwards. A book signing will follow.

Monica Ferrell is the author of three books of fiction and poetry, most recently the collection You Darling Thing (Four Way, 2018). Her novel The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press/Random House) was named one of Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of the Year. Her first collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry and won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize. She has been recognized with residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. She has taught fiction and poetry for the MFA Program at Columbia University, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY). She was born in New Delhi, India, and lives with her husband and children in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

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Literary House Series Presents:

First-Year Reading

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Tuesday, November 19, 2019 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

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Literary House Series Presents:

Two Events with Sophie Kerr Writer-in-Residence, Jason Fagone

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Jason Fagone

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

The Dark Art of Finding Ideas and Frustrating Your Rivals: A Craft Talk

Jason Fagone is a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle who has also covered technology, sports, and culture for the Huffington Post and other places. Fagone is the author of three books, the most recent of which is The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies (Dey Street Books, 2017). The Woman Who Smashed Codes tells the story of Elizabeth Smith Friedman, who solved the secret messages of Nazi Spies during WWII. His other books include Ingenious (Crown, 2013), which follows a small group of entrepreneurial inventors who set out to build a practical car that travels 100 miles on the energy in a single gallon of gas, and Horsemen of the Esophagus (Crown, 2006), about competitive eating. Fagone's nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, Esquire, and elsewhere. In 2014-15, he was the Knight-Wallace Fellow in journalism at the University of Michigan. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

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Literary House Series Presents:

R. Eric Thompson Residency

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Thursday, October 17, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Eric Reads the News: Humor in Current Events

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Literary House Series Presents:

Tea & Talk with Dr. Alisha Knight

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Thursday, September 26, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Agents Wanted: Selling Racial Uplift at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Dr. Alisha Knight will discuss her current research on the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company and their efforts to use book publishing and distribution networks to empower African Americans at the turn of the century.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Rebecca Makkai

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Thursday, September 5, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading and Q&A with Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca Makkai reads from her novel, The Great Believers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Afterwards, she will take audience questions and a book signing will follow.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. Her short fiction won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and was chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2008-2011). The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Fall Movie Night

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Friday, August 30, 2019 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Screening of Fences

Fences is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson and follows Troy Maxson (played by Denzel Washington) and his family, which includes his wife (played by Viola Davis, in an Oscar-winning role) and sons. The Boston Globe writes that the film comprises "two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama." Fences is set in 1950s Pittsburgh and confronts issues of racism, family, mental illness, and redemption.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Senior Reading

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Tuesday, April 23, 2019 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Come hear graduating senior writers read from their original pieces. The Literary House will also announce the winners of the Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, the William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and the Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Gene Demby

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Wednesday, April 17, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Talk by Gene Demby

Gene Demby is the lead blogger for National Public Radio's Code Switch team where he covers issues on race, ethnicity, and culture. He is also cohost of the weekly Code Switch podcast. Before coming to NPR, he served as the managing editor for Huffington Post's Black Voices following its launch. He later covered politics. Prior to that role he spent six years in various positions at The New York Times. While working for the Times in 2007, he started a blog about race, culture, politics and media called PostBourgie, which won the 2009 Black Weblog Award for Best News/Politics Site.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

Visiting Writer Rion Amilcar Scott

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Thursday, April 11, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Rion Amilcar Scott

Rion Amilcar Scott will read from his fiction as part of the Living Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

Visiting Writer Lidia Yuknavitch

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Tuesday, March 19, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch will read from her fiction as part of the Living Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

Visiting Writer Edward P. Jones

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Thursday, February 28, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones will read from his fiction as part of the Living Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Tea & Talk with Andy Oros

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Monday, February 11, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Tea & Talk with Andy Oros

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Living Writers Series Presents:

Visiting Writer Lucy Corin

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Fiction Reading with Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin will read from her fiction as part of the Living Writers Series, co-sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Sophie Kerr Prize Informational

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Tuesday, January 29, 2019 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

So You Want to Submit a Sophie Kerr Prize Portfolio?: An Informational Session

Led by Professors James Allen Hall and Kate Moncrief, this brief informational session is designed for graduating seniors who are preparing to submit Sophie Kerr Prize portfolios in spring 2019. The session will cover the guidelines for submitting a portfolio and offer helpful advice about constructing a portfolio that highlights each writer's strengths.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Fall Movie Night

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Friday, December 7, 2018 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Screening of Bright Star

This 2009 film directed by Jane Campion focuses on the last three year of the poet John Keats's life, and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne. The film includes many of Keats's poems, including "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Ode to a Nightingale," as well as the sonnet which inspires the title.

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Literary House Series Presents:

First-Year Reading

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Wednesday, November 28, 2018 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Annual First-Year Reading

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

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Literary House Series Presents:

Erika L. Sánchez

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Monday, November 12, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Poetry Reading and Q&A with Erika L. Sánchez

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago. She is the author of a collection of poems, Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf, 2017) as well as the young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2017), which was a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. Sánchez graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then went onto Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. Since graduate school, Sánchez has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, Bread Loaf Scholarship, the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, and a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. She was recently named a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many prestigious literary journals, including Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Vinyl Poetry, Guernica, Boston Review, ESPN.com, the Paris Review, Gulf Coast, and POETRY Magazine. Her poetry has also been featured on “Latino USA” on NPR and published in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).

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Literary House Series Presents:

An Alumni Journalism Panel

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Friday, November 2, 2018 4:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Truth in an Age of Alternative Facts

How is rhetoric used in journalism, politics, and public relations in this day and age? Panelists from each of those fields will illuminate how rhetoric or "spin" has shaped American culture in the last two years, with some discussion of relaying information and facts in a "Post-Truth" society.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Fall Movie Night

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Friday, October 26, 2018 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Screening of Interview with the Vampire

Based on the Anne Rice novel of the same name and directed by Neil Jordan, Interview with the Vampire stars Tom Cruise as the vampire Lestat, who tells his un-life story to a San Francisco reporter. The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Original Score, and Kirsten Dunst, in one of her first movie roles ever, received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Talk with Mya Gosling

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Wednesday, October 3, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

That's the Humor of It: Good Tickle Brain and the Silly Side of Shakespeare

Mya Gosling will present this talk of her webcomic series as it intersects Shakespeare studies.

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Sophie Kerr Series Presents:

A Talk by David Wallace

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Wednesday, September 12, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Horrible History, Terrible Tale: Chaucer and Jephthah's Daughter

David Wallace has been Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, since 1996. He is a Fellow of the English Association and currently President of the Medieval Academy of America. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Chaucerian Polity (Stanford, 1999), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2002), Strong Women (Oxford, 2011), and Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford, 2017). In 2016, Oxford University Press published Europe: A Literary History 1348-1418, a revolutionary literary history conceived of and edited by David Wallace that breaks with older nationalist models. Rome-centered, Latinate cultures emphasized by earlier literary histories are here supplemented by Greek and Byzantine, Armenian and Slavic, Arabic and Hebrew writings across a wide range of locales. His primary commitments are to Europe and European literatures, to the performance and enjoyment of poetry (especially Chaucer), and to helping secure a viable future for younger scholars.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Talk & Tea with Kimberly Andrews and Lindsay Lusby

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Wednesday, September 5, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Kimberley Andrews and Lindsay Lusby

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Literary House Series Presents:

Fall Movie Night

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Friday, August 21, 2018 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Screening of Moonlight

Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and directed by Barry Jenkins, this lyrical film follows its hero, Chiron, from childhood to adulthood and takes a piercing look at masculinity, race, sexuality, and coming of age in America. Moonlight won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali, in a powerhouse performance), and Best Adapted Screenplay.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Senior Reading

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Thursday, April 17, 2018 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Come hear graduating senior writers read from their original pieces. The Literary House will also announce the winners of the Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, the William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and the Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Two Events with the Mary Wood Fellow

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Tuesday, April 10, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Craft Talk with Amber Dermont

Wednesday, April 11, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Amber Dermont

Amber Dermont is the author of the novel, The Starboard Sea (St. Martin's Press, 2012), and the short story collection, Damage Control (St. Martin's, 2013). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Dermont received her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Her short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, and in the anthologies Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Worst Years of Your Life, and Home of the Brave. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, InPrint, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, she is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is at work on another novel called The Laughing Girl.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Amy Hempel

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Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel will read from her work as part of the Literary House Series sponsored by the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

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Sophie Kerr Lecture Series Presents:

Phil Sicker

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Wednesday, March 21, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Phil Sicker

Philip Sicker is a Professor of English at Fordham University in Bronx, NY. He is the author of Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James (Princeton, 1980), and numerous articles on Joyce, Mann, Eliot, Lawrence, Nabokov, novel theory, and film. He is the co-editor of Joyce Studies Annual. His forthcoming book, Ulysses, Visual Technologies, and Culture, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Visiting Writer Natalie Diaz

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Thursday, February 1, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Poetry Reading with Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Diaz's work has also appeared in Narrative Magazine, Gwarlingo, The Rumpus, and Ploughshares. Her poetry has has garnered the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, a US Artists Ford Fellowship, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her poems, folding Spanish and Mojave into American English, yield an urgent and important new voice to the cannon of contemporary Native American poetry, finding a place among the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Sophie Kerr Prize Informational

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Tuesday, January 30, 2018 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

So You Want to Submit a Sophie Kerr Prize Portfolio?: An Informational Session

Led by Professor James Allen Hall, this brief informational session is designed for graduating seniors who are preparing to submit Sophie Kerr Prize portfolios in spring 2018. The session will cover the guidelines for submitting a portfolio and offer helpful advice about constructing a portfolio that highlights each writer's strengths.

 

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Literary House Series Presents:

First-Year Reading

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Tuesday, November 28, 2017 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Annual First-Year Reading

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Reading with Terrance Hayes

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Monday, November 1, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks

One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of five books of poetry; How to Be Drawn (2015), longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including a 2014 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, two Pushcart selections, eight Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has also been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Book Launch with Lia Purpura

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Thursday, October 19, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Scream: A Literary House Press Book Launch with Lia Purpura

Join us for a creative nonfiction reading and book signing as the Literary House Press releases a special, limited-edition letterpress chapbook, Scream (or never minding), by Lia Purpura, including original illustrations by local artist Stuart Cawley.

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Sophie Kerr Lecture Series Presents:

James Allen Hall

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Monday, October 9, 2017 5:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Creative Nonfiction Reading by James Allen Hall

James Allen Hall is an associate professor of English at Washington College, where he also serves as Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House. In April 2017, he published I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, a book of lyric personal essays which won Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Essay Collection Award, judged by Chris Kraus. Also a poet, Hall is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and others. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry as well as in leading national literary venues.

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Sophie Kerr Lecture Series Presents:

Two Events with Craig Steven Wilder

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Thursday, September 28, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Hynson Lounge

A Reading with Craig Steven Wilder

Friday, September 29, 2017 10:00 AM ET
CAC Common Room

A Presentation with Craig Steven Wilder

Craig Steven Wilder is a historian of American institutions and ideas. His most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013), which Kirkus Reviews named one of the best nonfiction books of the year and which won multiple book awards. It inspired the Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spalding's song, “Ebony and Ivy” in Emily's D+Evolution (Concord Records, 2016). A book titled Ebony & Ivy was featured in the film Dear White People (Code Red Films, 2014). He is also the author of A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (Columbia University Press, 2001) and In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York University Press, 2001). Professor Wilder began his career as a community organizer in the South Bronx. He is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a visiting professor, a commencement speaker, and an academic advisor. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Williams College, and Long Island University, and he has been a visiting professor at the New School University and University College London. He is currently the Barton L. Weller Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Sophie Kerr Lecture Series Presents:

Dr. Lauret Savoy

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Thursday, September 21, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Decker Theater

First Year Book Reading with Dr. Lauret Savoy, from Trace

Dr. Lauret Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College. Trace (Counterpoint Press) won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Trace was also a finalist for the PEN American Open Book Award and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, as well as shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

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Sophie Kerr Lecture Series Presents:

Maureen Corrigan

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Wednesday, September 6, 2017 5:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014. Corrigan's literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! was published in 2005. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post's Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges' panel of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is currently a curator at the American Writers Museum in Chicago.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Spring Movie Nights

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Thursday, May 4, 2017 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A film screening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Directed by Garth Jennings, and created by Douglas Adams, this film stars Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, and the voices of Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Senior Reading

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Thursday, April 20, 2017 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Come hear graduating senior writers read from their original pieces. The Literary House will also announce the winners of the Literary House Genre Fiction Prize, the William W. Warner Prize for Creative Writing on Nature and the Environment, and the Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Spring Movie Nights

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Wednesday, April 19, 2017 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Film Screening of Carol

The screenplay for this film, written by Phyllis Nagy, is based on the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt (also known as Carol) by Patricia Highsmith. The film stars Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Jake Lacy, and Kyle Chandler.

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The Personal & The Political Presents:

An Evening with Chris Abani

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Thursday, April 6, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Public Reading with Chris Abani

Chris Abani's books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas (Pengiun, 2014), Song for Night (Akashic Books, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Pengiun, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic Books, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador, 2005), and Masters of the Board (Delta 1985). His poetry collections are Sanctificum (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), There Are No Names For Red (Red Hen Press, 2010), Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems (Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2010), Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen Press, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrianian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian.

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The Personal & The Political Presents:

An Evening with Carolyn Forché.

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Thursday, March 30, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

>A Reading with Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché's first volume, Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1975), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1981), The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), and Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003). She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting (W.W. Norton, 1983), has been praised by Nelson Mandela as "itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice," and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton). In 1988 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is currently at work on a memoir.

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The Political & The Personal Series Presents:

Christine J. Wade

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Thursday, February 24, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Faculty Tea & Talk with Christine J. Wade

Christine J. Wade is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies and the Curator of the Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where she teaches classes on Latin American politics, comparative peace processes, human rights, US-Latin American Relations, and the politics of development. She is an expert in the politics of Central America, and has conducted field research in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. She is the author of Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador (Ohio University Press, January 2016), and co-author of Nicaragua: Emerging from the Shadow of the Eagle (Westview Press, 2016), Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion and Change (Westview Press, 2014), and A Revolução Salvadorenha (The Salvadoran Revolution) (Fundação Editora Da UNESP, 2006). She is the co-author and co-editor of Latin American Politics and Development, which will appear in its 9th edition in July 2017. She is also the author of other scholarly works dealing with revolutions and post-war violence and peacebuilding. Her current events commentaries regularly appear in World Politics Review, the Latin American Advisor, and other venues.

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The Personal & The Political Series Presents:

An Evening with Brian Turner

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Tuesday, February 21, 2017 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Brian Turner

Brian Turner is a poet and memoirist who served seen years in the US Army. He is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (Alice James, 2010), and Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005), which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times "Editor's Choice" selection, the 2006 PEN Center USA "Best in the West" award, the 2007 Poets Prize, and others. Turner's work has been published in National Geographic, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, Harper's Magazine, and other fine journals. Turner has been awarded a United States Artists Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and more. His recent memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), has been called, "achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful."

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Literary House Series Presents:

Spring Movie Nights

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Friday, February 17, 2017 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A film screening of To Kill a Mockingbird

Directed by Robert Mulligan, this three-time Academy Award-winning film stars Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Mary Badham as Scout. The screenplay by Horton Foote is based on Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Sophie Kerr Prize Informational

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Tuesday, January 31, 2020 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

So You Want to Submit a Sophie Kerr Prize Portfolio?: An Informational Session

Led by Professor James Allen Hall, this brief informational session is designed for graduating seniors who are preparing to submit Sophie Kerr Prize portfolios in spring 2017. The session will cover the guidelines for submitting a portfolio and offer helpful advice about constructing a portfolio that highlights each writer's strengths.

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Literary House Series Presents:

First Year Reading

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Tuesday, November 29, 2016 7:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Annual First-Year Reading

Come hear Washington College first-year writers read from their original work!

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Living Writers Series Presents:

Timothy Donnelly

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Timothy Donnelly

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove 2003) and The Cloud Corportation (Wave, 2010/Picador, 2012), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His chapbook Hymn to Life was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2014 and with John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O'Brien he is the co-author of Three Poets. He is the recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is currently chair of the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts and poetry editory of Boston Review. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

An Evening with Cathy Linh Che

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles who lives and works in New York City.

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Literary House Series Presents:

Find Your Subject & Voice

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Friday, October 21, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Workshop for Writers of Fiction & Memoir with Laura Oliver '75

Using published examples, writing exercises, expert instruction, and lively discussion, this dynamic workshop will help you find the story you wish to tell and the most authentic authorial voice in which to tell it.

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Literary House Series Presents:

A Literary House Press Book Launch

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Tuesday, October 18, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

Still Life with Poem: A Literary House Press Book Launch

Come join the Rose O'Neill Literary House to celebrate the book launch of Still Life with Poem, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby. The night will feature poetry readings by James Arthur, James Allen Hall, Leslie Harrison, Dawn Lonsinger, Lindsay Lusby, Dora Malech, and Jason Schneiderman.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

An Evening with Denise Duhamel

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Thursday, October 6, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel's most recent book of poetry Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009); Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orhisis, 1997) . She and Maureen Seaton co-authored CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Duhamel is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

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Living Writers Series Presents:

An Evening with Jericho Brown

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Thursday, September 29, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is author of Please (New Issues 2008), which won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

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Literary House Series Presents:

The First-Year Book Reading

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Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:30 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House

A Reading with Idra Novey

Idra Novey is the author of Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown 2016), a New York Times Editors' Choice and Staff Pick at The Paris Review. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012), selected for the National Poetry Series, The Next Country (Alice James, 2008), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, and Clarice: The Visitor (Sylph Editions, 2015), a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and she's written for The New York Times, NPR's All Things Considered, Slate, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. She's also translated the work of several prominent Brazilian writers, most recently Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. She's taught at Princeton University, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, the Catholic University of Chile, and in the Bard Prison Initiative.

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