1 September 2022 Guggenheim Fellow Joins Trias Series

Poet and essayist Jenny Boully, the 2022-2023 Trias Writer-in-Residence, will give a reading of her work on Thursday, Sept. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Bartlett Theatre.

This year’s Trias Reading Series will kick off with poet and essayist Jenny Boully, the 2022-2023 Trias Writer-in-Residence. The reading and Q&A will be held on Thursday, Sept. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Bartlett Theatre. The event is free and open to the public. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction, Boully teaches at Bennington College and is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writers Seminars.

Boully is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, which the Georgia Review described as “a supple and suggestive volume, one dedicated to multiplying literary possibilities even as it names and forcefully critiques the economic and institutional forces that construct and constrain such possibility.”

Her prose is “reminiscent of Lydia Davis’—spare, elliptical, unexpected—and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein’s. … Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words,” according to a Kirkus review.

Boully’s first book, The Body: An Essay, published when she was 25, is regarded as a canonical text in experimental essays, poetic prose, and imaginative form. Her other books include The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays; [one love affair] *; not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them; and of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures.

Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Next American Essay, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.

Boully received an M.A. in English criticism and writing from Hollins University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This fall’s Trias Reading Series will also feature Lacy M. Johnson on Oct. 13, Kendra Allen on Nov. 17, and Katherine Indermaur on Dec. 1—all taking place at 7 p.m. in the Barlett Theatre. This year’s Trias Writers Residency Director is Associate Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and English Geoffrey Babbitt, who can be reached at trias@hws.edu.

The Trias Residency for Writers is named after poet Peter J. Trias ’70, author of the collection The House in Venice. His gift to the Colleges established the Peter J. Trias ’70 Endowed Fund for Poetry and Creative Writing, to help attract poets and writers of distinction to the campus.