The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature Hope graduates Katherine Bode-Lang and Laura Donnelly on Thursday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. in Wnants Auditorium of Graves Hall for the ninth annual Tom Andrews Memorial Reading.
There will also be a question-and-answer session earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The public is invited to both the reading and the Q&A. Admission is free.
Katherine Bode-Lang graduated from Hope in 2002 and pursued an MFA in poetry at Penn State University, where she currently serves as an IT trainer with the Office for Research Protections.
Bode-Lang is the author of “The Reformation,” which recently won the 2014 American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize and is slated for release this month from Copper Press.
Her chapbook “Spring Melt” placed second in the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Contest and earned the New England Poetry Club’s Jean Pedrick Chapbook award. Bode-Lang’s poetry has been featured in numerous journals including “The American Poetry Review,” “Beloit,” “The Mid-American Review” and “The Cincinnati Review.”
Laura Donnelly, who is a 2001 Hope graduate, lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario and teaches at SUNY Oswego. She previously taught writing and literature courses at Knox College, Western Michigan University and Purdue University, and served as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal “Third Coast.”
Her first book of poetry, “Watershed,” won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, “Nocturne-Schumann’s Letters.” Donnelly’s poetry has been published in “Rhino,” “Cimarron Review,” “Third Coast,” “Poetry East,” “DIAGRAM” and several other journals.
Every year, one reading in the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is done in honor of Tom Andrews (1961-2001), a 1984 Hope graduate who was born and grew up in West Virginia. Following Hope, he earned his M.F.A. at the University of Virginia. In his lifetime, Andrews published three books of poems and a memoir, “Codeine Diary,” about his coming to terms with his hemophilia and his determined refusal to let it circumscribe his life. He also edited two collections of essays, “The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright” and “On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things.” In 2002, Oberlin College Press published “Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews,” a posthumous volume comprised of two previously published books of poetry, “The Brother’s Country” and “The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle,” and other works.
Additional information about the series is available online at jrvws.org.
Graves Hall is located at 263 College Ave., between 10th and 12th streets. The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave, at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.