The Avalon Foundation and the Spy have once again agreed to partner this spring to bring some of the region’s most talented writers and poets to the stage at the Stoltz Listening Room.
The first Spy Night will be hosting the Word Girls on February 28th. The The “Word Girls,” are three award-winning poets with deep Shore connections. Teachers as well as editors and writers, this group, including Meredith Davies Hadaway, Erin Murphy and Amanda Newell, has brought poetry to diverse audiences with work that deals with environmental and social issues with sensitivity, poignancy and often humor.
Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Small Craft Warning, a collaboration with visual artist Marcy Dunn Ramsey. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts as well as a Maryland Arts Council Individual Artist Award. 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 the Sophie Kerr Poet-in-Residence 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.
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. 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.
All Spy Nights will begin at 6pm. Tickets are available here.
