Award-winning poet Jane Springer to give public reading

Image taken from the cover of Springer’s 2012 collection “Murder Ballad”

Celebrated poet Jane Springer, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient and Whiting Writers’ Award winner who teaches literature and creative writing at Hamilton College in upstate New York, will present a poetry reading on campus this week.

The reading will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 21 in Ochre Court. It is being hosted by the Department of English and Communications in observance of National Poetry Month.

Springer, a Tennessee native who grew up in several small towns across the south, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize from the University of Utah Press for her debut poetry collection, “Dear Blackbird” (2007). Her second collection, “Murder Ballad” (2012) received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books.

She says of her work: “The landscapes and stories of folks in and around the towns I come from seem too small and fleeting for notation in conventional history books; when viewed as integral to a long tradition of pastorals that Theocritus began, they seem more lyrically epic, somehow: more as I see them.”

A reception featuring refreshments, a book signing and bluegrass music will follow the reading.