News & Events Amherst College Dean and Writer Susan Snively to Read from Her Work May 1

April 21, 2008
Contact: Emanuel Costache '09
Media Relations Intern
413/542-2321
Caroline Jenkins Hanna
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Susan Snively, the director of the Writing Center at Amherst College and associate dean of students, will read from her work at 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 1, in Cole Assembly Room of Amherst College’s Converse Hall. The reading marks Snively’s retirement after 27 years of service to the college and will be a celebration of her work and life at Amherst. Both the reading and the reception to follow in the lobby are free and open to the public.

In her fourth book of poems, Skeptic Traveler, Snively chronicles her travels throughout the United States and Europe in accessible and artful verse. William H. Pritchard, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst, called the book, “a collection graced by intelligence, wit, and also by a feeling heart,” while former Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur described her work as “clean-cut, fluent, witty, direct, fully of personality and surprise.” “[She] can also be deeply meditative, grave and affecting, uproarious,” he said.

Snively is a graduate of Smith College and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Boston University. At Amherst since 1981, she became the director of the Writing Center in 1993. In addition to 2005’s Skeptic Traveler, Snively has published three books of poetry: From This Distance (1981), Voices in the House (1988) and The Undertow (1998). Her poems have also appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Poetry Review, The Antioch Review and many other literary reviews and magazines.

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