CANCELED: Molly McCully Brown

press release: Molly McCully Brown’s most recent books are Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea Books, 2020), an essay collection Kirkus Review, in a starred review, called “powerful,” and In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020) a poetry collection co-authored with Susannah Nevison. She is also the author of the poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017.  Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, praised its “rich imagery,” and  the “humbling and heartbreaking” poems.

Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Crazyhorse, The New York Times, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and elsewhere.

As an accomplished writer of both poetry and essays, Brown was asked by The Adroit Journal about the difference between the two: “I think, for me, the difference between writing poetry and prose is less a question of wanting to express different ideas or experiences than a question of wanting to express ideas or experiences differently. That is to say, it’s more a matter of scope and angle then of content. A poem is like a pressure cooker, and I think I will always be most in love with the little worlds that their necessary compression and lyricism produces. A poem is somehow always both whole and fragmentary, and something about that feels like my first language. But I write essays when I want a little more breathing room, a little more space to unpack something, to provide context, to make digressions, and tell stories, and work my way from my usual essential uncertainty toward solid ground. There’s a lot of overlap between my prose and my poems, and I like to think they’re always to talking to each other. I’m so grateful to be able to write—and read—both.”

Raised in rural Virginia, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Stanford University, and the University of Mississippi, where she received her MFA. She lives in Norfolk, VA and teaches at Old Dominion University, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Nonfiction, and a member of the MFA Core Faculty.

This event is co-sponsored by Felix, UW-Madison’s Creative Writing Program, McBurney Disability Resource Center, Wisconsin Book Festival, and The Anonymous Fund at UW-Madison’s English Department.