25th Women Writing About Women Anniversary Celebration

Release date: March 30, 2009 |

For a quarter-century, Goucher College’s Women Writing About Women Symposium has honored talented female student writers from high schools throughout the country and brought to campus outstanding women writers-in-residence, including Maxine Kumin, Cristina García, and Dalia Sofer.

The college will celebrate the program’s 25th anniversary by presenting a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey on Tuesday, March 31, at 8 p.m. in Buchner Hall of the Alumnae/i House. This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved by calling 410-337-6333 or by e-mailing boxoffice@goucher.edu. 

Trethewey’s reading will complement a writers’ roundtable by three former writers-in-residence—Dorothy Allison, Michelle Cliff, and Thrity Umrigar—on Monday, March 30, at 7 p.m. in Buchner Hall of the Alumnae/i House. The event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved by calling 410-337-6333 or by e-mailing boxoffice@goucher.edu. 

Born in Gulfort, Mississippi, Trethewey earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia. She has earned a master’s of the arts in English and creative writing from Hollins University and a master’s of fine arts in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.

Trethewey’s first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Her work has appeared in several volumes of Best American Poetry and in literary journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review.

Trethewey’s most recent book of poetry, Native Guard, won the 2007 Pultizer Prize. The book of poems focuses on the Native Guard, one of the first black Union regiments mustered into service during the Civil War. The theme is interwoven with poems honoring Trethewey’s mother and recalling her childhood and how it was affected by her parents’ interracial marriage, which was still illegal at the time.

During the writers’ roundtable, Dorothy Allison will present “Memory: a Sacrament; and Fiction: a Way of Life.” Allison is the McGee Professor and writer-in-residence at Davidson College in North Carolina. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, she is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her works include The Women Who Hate Me, Trash, Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and the forthcoming She Who. She is also an award-winning editor for Quest, Conditions, and Outlook— early feminist and lesbian and gay journals.

Michelle Cliff will present “Everything Is Now: a Reading With Commentary” during the roundtable discussion. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Cliff bases much of her writing on the lives of the Caribbean people. Her works include Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Bodies of Water, a collection of short stories. Her prose poetry and critical works have appeared in publications such as Ms. and The Village Voice.

Novelist, memoirist, educator, and critic Thrity Umrigar will contribute to the roundtable with a discussion on “Writing About Power Issues.” Umrigar came to the United States from Mumbai, India, when she was 21 years old. Her works include Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and First Darling of the Morning, a memoir about her childhood in India. A recipient of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University, Umrigar teaches creative writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University. She also contributes regularly to the book pages of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

These events are being sponsored by Goucher College’s Women’s Studies Program and the Kratz Center for Creative Writing.