WILSON, N.C. — March 14, 2018 — Barton College is pleased to welcome poet Barbara Presnell for the upcoming Victor R. Small Writers Series Lecture on Wednesday, March 21. The lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on campus. This event is free of charge, and the community is invited to attend.
Presnell is an essayist and poet who lives in Lexington, N.C. Her latest poetry book, “Blue Star” (Press 53), traces her family’s involvement in war from the Civil War to the present through military records, census reports, letters, journals, and photographs. Her poetry book, “Piece Work,” won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize.
Her poems and essays have appeared in the “Cumberland River Review,” “War, Literature, and the Arts,” “The Southern Review,” “Appalachian Journal,” as well as other journals and anthologies. Presnell has received grant and residency support from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Kentucky Arts Council, Soapstone, Inc., and Willapa Bay AiR.
She teaches writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her areas of interest are creative writing, poetry, and non-fiction, rhetoric and composition, American literature, and writing in collaboration with other art forms.
The recipient of several awards, Presnell has received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize in 2006, the Linda Flowers Prize from the N.C. Humanities Council in 2004, the Oscar Arnold Young Best Book Award from the Poetry Council of N.C. in 1998, and the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Best Book Award from the N.C. Poetry Society in 1995.
Her academic credentials include a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And, she later completed a Master of Arts degree at the University of Kentucky.
The Victor R. Small Writers Series is sponsored by the School of Humanities at Barton College. For additional information, please contact Dr. James A. Clark, dean of the School of Humanities and the Elizabeth H. Jordan Chair for Southern Literature, at 252-399-6450 or jclark@barton.edu .
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