Betsy Sholl

Betsy Sholl is the author of five books of poetry, including Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter, Rooms Overhead, The Red Line, winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs Award for Poetry, and Don’t Explain, winner of the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Other awards include an NEA grant and two Maine Artists’ Fellowships. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, the Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and West Branch, among other journals, and in several anthologies, including Letters to America, Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and Boomer Girls. She is a founding member of Alice James Books.

In the American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Rita Dove offers praise for Sholl’s latest collection: “Don’t Explain accomplishes that most difficult of tasks: the weaving together of seemingly unrelated events so that revelation unfolds effortlessly. These poems are what narrative can aspire to—namely, the grace and ease of the lyric rhapsody. And yet the charm of the anecdotes, Sholl’s facility with line and image, never take precedence over the hard facts of our daily living.”

Sholl grew up on the New Jersey shore and holds degrees from Bucknell University, the University of Rochester, and Vermont College. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA Program.

Sponsored by The Anne P. Nicholson '40 Distinguished Lecturer Series