JAN 2005 -5-

Award-Winning Poet Fennelly Reads at Brenau

Brenau University welcomes the awarding-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly – winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize – for a free and open-to-the-public reading at noon, Wednesday, Jan. 26 in Banks Recital Hall, John. S. Burd Center for the Performing Arts, on Academy Street.

A 4 p.m. workshop follows later, also in Banks Recital Hall.

Fennelly is one of the authors participating in the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Her first book, “Open House,” won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and was a BookSense Top Ten poetry pick. She has also received a Puchcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is now an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi and lives with her husband, writer Tom Franklin, and their daughter,

Claire, in Oxford, Miss. Her second book, “Tender Hooks,” was published by W. W. Norton in 2004.

“I wrote Tender Hooks,” Fennelly says, “because I wanted to figure out what I was experiencing. Not to provide answers, but to understand questions ... As a child I misheard the word ‘tenterhooks.’ And the title I have chosen for this book reflects the sharp/sweet ambiguities of parenting.”

The Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of colleges and universities around the state that pool their resources in order to bring nationally known poets for readings and workshops to Georgia campuses. Sponsored by Brenau University, the Circuit also receives grants from the Georgia Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information call 770.534.6195.