CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College welcomes poet Idra Novey to read and discuss her work at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, 407 Washington Avenue, on Tuesday, December 4. The reading will begin at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

            Novey’s latest poetry collection, Exit Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012),  includes poems inspired by her time teaching in the Bard Prison Initiative, an educational program that enrolls incarcerated men and women in courses at five campuses across New York. It was a 2011 National Poetry Series Selection.

            Her The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008) was a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry. She also has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund.

            Novey has translated several books from Spanish and Portuguese, including Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions, 2012), and serves as director of the literary translation program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts.

            Novey’s visit is the final installment in the Literary House’s “Jewish Voices” series. Click here to listen to Novey’s recent appearance as a “NewsPoet” on NPR’s All Things Considered.