LEWISTON, Idaho – Award-winning writer and poetry author Monique Ferrell will read some of her work at the Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts & History, located at 415 Main St., on Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. as part of the LC State Humanities Division’s Fall Visiting Writer Series.
The event is free and open to the public.
Ferrell is a professor at New York City College of Technology and teaches a variety of subjects, including African-American and gender studies. She is presently working on her fourth poetry collection, “bone,” and a collection of essays, which is her first creative non-fiction work, called “Things They Did To Me: My Family in Shades.”
Her poetry collections include “black body parts” (2002), “unsteady” (2011), and “attraversiamo” (2016).
Her writing has been featured in more than 20 publications and also on “The Slowdown” podcast, hosted by United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and in the award-winning documentary film short “Reading the Body: Poetry & Dance on Recovery.” Additionally, her work has appeared in noted creative writing journals, magazines, and anthologies, including American Poetry Review; Antioch Review; Reed Magazine; Talking River Review; Oroboro Literary Review; Winning Writers; North American Review; African Voices; Bellevue Literary Review; Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Soul; Through The Ash, New Leaves; Token Entry: New York City Subway Poems; Out of The Rough: Women’s Poems of Survival; and Rabbit Ears: Poems About Television, among others.
She is a two-time finalist (2020, ’21) for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She has won several honors, including honorable mention for the Winning Writers Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Prize (2019); Honor Book Prize for Poetry (2017), and The Julie Suk Prize For Poetry (2016). Recently, poems from “bone” have been made finalist/semi-finalist in contests sponsored by New Millennium Writings, Tulip Tree Publishing, Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, and Bellingham Literary Review.
Since 2021, Ferrell has been a reviewer for the distinguished Bellevue Literary Review and is currently conducting research for her next poetry collection, “bloodroot,” which seeks to trace her family back to the first African woman brought to America in bondage.
Ferrell’s visit is being sponsored by the Rosehill Estate and LC State's Humanities Division.