Poetry Reading Features Award-winning Author
Fleda Brown, winner of the 2007 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and
former poet laureate of Delaware, will read from her works during a
poetry reading at Alma College.
Brown’s presentation, part of Alma College ‘s Michigan Author Speaker
Series, takes place at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12 in the Alma College
Library. Admission is free and open to the public.
“Fleda Brown is a warm and wise poet,” says Bill Palmer, professor of
English. “Her poems focus on a variety of experiences, such as a family
cottage at Central Lake, playing flashlight tag, swimming at night, a
mother watching her athletic daughter, a sister remembering her
intellectually disabled brother, 9-11, going through security at
airports, evil, and Elvis.
Fleda Brown
“Thoughtful and entertaining, Brown helps us see what it means to be human in all our complexity,” he says.
Brown’s books, essays, and individual poems have won many awards. Her sixth collection of poems, Reunion
(2007), was the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize from the University of
Wisconsin. She has read and lectured in secondary schools, retirement
communities, libraries, bookstores, a prison for delinquent
adolescents, Rotary Clubs, AAUWs, and many universities and colleges,
from Oxford University, London, to small liberal arts colleges.
Her experiences include reading with cowboy poets in North Dakota and
for the Delaware governor and legislature. She served as poet laureate
of Delaware from 2001 to 2007, when she retired from the University of
Delaware.
She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency master’s
program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and she spends
summers with her husband, also a retired English professor, at their
cottage on a small lake in northern Michigan. Between them, they have
four children and 10 grandchildren.
Brown was born in Columbia, Mo., and grew up in Fayetteville, Ark. She
earned her Ph.D. in English, with a specialty in American Literature,
from the University of Arkansas. In 1978 she joined the faculty of the
University of Delaware English Department, where she founded the Poets
in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than 12 years.
Posted: Fri, October 31st, 2008 at 12:37AM
