Holy Cross Kicks off Visiting Writers Series with Award-winning Author and Poet

WORCESTER, Mass. – Award-winning author and poet Meg Kearney will kick off the 2010-11 Visiting Writers Series at the College of the Holy Cross with a reading on Thursday, Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.

Kearney’s most recent collection of poetry, Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), was the winner of Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year and the PEN New England LL Winship Award.  Her first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005.  Kearney is currently working on a picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog (Scholastic, 2012), which will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis.

Kearney serves as the director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., as well as the director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Seminars.  Previously she was an associate director of the National Book Foundation in New York City.  She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from 1999 – 2001 and a recipient of the 2001 Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Kearney also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998.

She lives in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trooper.

* Read Kearney's poem Carnal >>

The 2010-11 Visiting Writers Series will also include the following readings and performances during the fall semester:

* Thursday, Oct. 28 – Tom Perrotta, novelist and screenwriter * Thursday, Nov. 11 – Debra Marquart; memoirist, poet, storyteller, and rock musician * Thursday, Dec. 9 – Leah Hager Cohen; nonfiction writer, novelist, and Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at Holy Cross, will lead a panel on “A Life in Letters,” with Nicole Lamy, book editor of The Boston Globe, and Barney Karpfinger, of The Karpfinger Literary Agency in New York.