CHESTERTOWN, MD—Linda Gregerson, a poet who has made significant contributions to the literary world over the past three decades, will speak and read from her work at Washington College’s Rose O’ Neill Literary House on Tuesday, September 22, at 4:30 p.m. as part of the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public. 

Gregerson is the author of six books of poetry, Fire in the Conservatory (1982), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), Waterborne (2002), Magnetic North (2007), The Selvage (2012), and Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2014, published this month byHoughton Mifflin. The latter is a collection of 50 previously published works plus ten new poems. In reviewing Prodigal, a critic for the Chicago Tribune wrote that her poems “seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality (Chicago Tribune).” And a reviewer in the August 31 issue of The New Yorker wrote that her poems “constantly renegotiate the terms of human happiness and safety in light of randomized peril.”

Gregerson, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan, is especially known for her visually spaced three-line stanzas, or tercets. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, and the Modern Poetry Association, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Magnetic North was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Waterborne won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.  Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review (UK), and many other publications. 

Gregerson is also the author of two volumes of literary criticism, Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (2001) and The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (1995), and the co-editor, with Susan Juster, of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic World(2011).  Her essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in many journals and anthologies, includingThe Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, Milton Studies, Criticism, and ELH (English Literary History). 

She has served on the faculties of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers Conference, The Prague Seminars, The Bear River Writer’s Conference, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. 

For more information on Linda Gregerson or her works visit http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gregerso/. For information on this reading or the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series, visit http://www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse.