The Word Girls Are Back: A Chat with Poets Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy and Amanda Newell

For over a decade, award winning poets Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy, and Amanda Newell have joined creative forces to bring their new and past works to a loyal readership in Chestertown and continue a poetry reading tradition begun over a decade ago.

All friends, World Girl—named after renowned poetry publisher WordTech—Hadaway, Murphy and Newell also share connections to Chestertown and Washington College as alumni, and faculty/staff, former and current. 

Each of them brings a significant and unique voice to their readings. It will be an evening no poetry lover should miss.

The Bookplate is happy to announce that Word Girls are back in town to wrap up the year’s Authors & Oysters series with a poetry reading and book signing at 6 pm Wednesday, December 14 at the Retriever Bar on High Street.

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.”

The Spy caught up with the three last week for a sampling of their works and a chat.

This video is approximately twelve minutes in length. For more information about the Bookplate in Chestertown please go here.