The Denison University Beck Lecture Series closes its 2003/04 season with an appearance by the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, Beth Ann Fennelly. Also the winner of the inaugural Kenyon Review Prize for a First Book in 2001 for her volume titled "Open House," Fennelly will appear at 8 p.m. on Tuesday (April 20) in the Barney-Davis Hall Board Room. Her reading is free and open to the public.

"Beth Ann Fennelly's 'Open House' is a brilliant blueprint of the imagination," says David Baker, professor of English at Denison. "Here is sincere passion in great, mature portions, a tenderness toward her characters both far away and near, a historical aptitude and relevance, a strength of spirit, and a wisdom at home in the substantial body of the work."

Fennelly, who now resides in Oxford, Miss., earned her bachelors degreemagna cum laudefrom the University of Notre Dame in 1993. The following year she taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border, returning to earn a master of fine arts degree at the University of Arkansas. She received the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin and now is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts and is the recipient of the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writer's Conference. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The American Scholar and Poetry Ireland Review. Her second book, "Tender Hooks," is forthcoming from W.W. Norton this month.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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