Award-Winning Poet Shara Lessley is 2014 Mary Wood Fellow at the Lit House

Shara Lessley will be a writer in residence at the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College April 14 through 18 as the 2014 Mary Wood Fellow. During her week-long residency, she will deliver a craft talk on writing about place and a reading from her poetry, in addition to meeting with female student-poets to discuss their work one-on-one.

Shara Lessley will be a writer in residence at the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College April 14 through 18 as the 2014 Mary Wood Fellow.

Lessley’s first event, an informal discussion of craft called “Oh, The Places You’ll Go: Writing from Experience,” will be held at 4:30 p.m. on April 15. Later in the week, at 4:30 p.m. on the 17th, she will host “An Evening of Poetry with Shara Lessley.” Both events will be held in the Rose O’Neill Literary House, 407 Washington Avenue, and are free and open to the public.

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2012). Her awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Lessley’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. A recent resident of the Middle East, she is completing a new collection titled The Explosive Expert’s Wife.

The Mary Wood Fellowship at The Rose O’Neill Literary House is awarded biennially to an emerging female writer—in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction—who has published a first book. The Fellowship enables female creative writing students at Washington College to work with and learn from successful female writers such as past Fellows Laura van den Berg, Hannah Tinti, and Irina Reyn, who spend five days on campus. Eastern Shore author Mary Wood, whose support makes the fellowship possible, is a 1968 graduate of the College and a former member of its Board of Visitors and Governors.