Authors & Oysters: The Word Girls

The Bookplate is proud to announce the final segment of their Authors & Oysters events at The Retriever Bar for this year. Doug Richardson was featured in the most recent Authors & Oysters event on December 7th with his book, Down Wind and Out of Sight. On Wednesday, December 14th at 6pm, all are invited to The Retriever to hear poets Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy, and Amanda Newell for a book signing and poetry reading featuring their most recent works. Three award-winning poets, the “Word Girls,” are so named because they’ve all published books through WordTech, one of the nation’s largest poetry publishers. The three also share connections to Chestertown and Washington College as alumni, and faculty/staff, former and current. The Word Girls have been well-received in the past for poems that deal with environmental and social issues, with a sensitivity and poignancy that appeal to a wide readership. 

Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy, and Amanda Newell

Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of three poetry collections, including At The Narrows (winner of the Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing). She has received fellowships and awards from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and was, for ten years, poetry editor for The Summerset Review. She is currently collaborating on a book or river poems and paintings with artist Marcy Dunn Ramsey. Hadaway is the Sophie Kerr Poet-in-Residence for Spring 2023 at Washington College. 

Erin Murphy is the Poet Laureate of Blair County, PA, and the author or editor of thirteen books, most recently Taxonomies (2022) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. Her awards include the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and a Best of the Net award. She is an alumna of Washington College and UMass Amherst and an inductee in the Blair County Arts Hall of Fame. Website: www.erin-murphy.com

Amanda Newell’s collection, I Will Pass Even to Acheron, won the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and her first full-length collection, Postmortem Say, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press in 2023. She is Associate Editor for Special Features and Social Media for the contemporary poetry journal Plume. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Frost Place, as well as a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was the 2015 winner of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize, judged by Lynn Emanuel, for her poem, “A Woman from the Infant Mortality Review Board Calls.”

About Meredith: “…her stunning gifts merit reading her every chance you get.” -Women’s Voices for Change

About Erin:  “Murphy’s characteristically plain-spoken diction and her understated, at times dead-pan tone tackle themes like love, marriage, disease, and aging and philosophical questions like cruelty and suffering. Unsentimental and unflinching.” — Shara McCallum

About Amanda: “Music has to make itself distinct from noise, and poetry has to take back language from the clutches of the internet, the W9 form, the committee, and the TV. It is this taking back of language that is at the heart of Amanda Newell’s powerful and brave poem.” -Lynn Emanuel selected her poem, “A Woman From the Infant Mortality Review Board Calls” as the winner of Carlow University’s Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The next Authors & Oysters event is tentatively scheduled for 1/18 with Ernest Thompson. All events are held in the back room of The Retriever. The Retriever is located at 337 ½ High Street, in Chestertown, Maryland.