ST. MARY’S CITY, Md. (November 16, 2009) — Poet Laurie Clements Lambeth will read from her debut poetry collection, Veil and Burn, which addresses her struggles with multiple sclerosis, at 8:15 p.m. Thursday, November 19, 2009, in Daugherty-Palmer Commons at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM). This event is free and open to the public and is part of the college’s VOICES Reading Series.
Lambeth’s poetry collection was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winner Maxine Kumin for the National Poetry Series. Kumin writes that Lambeth’s poems are “both lyrical and pragmatic, nostalgic and tough-minded.” Lambeth has lived with multiple sclerosis (MS) for over 20 years, and it has affected her sense of touch, movement, and vision. Her poetry seeks ways to understand the subtleties of these symptoms, and how they correspond to the world. Mark Doty, author of School of the Arts, writes that she “understands that the crisis facing the speaker in this indelible book—the dawning struggles of MS, which troubles the nerves and veils and burns the vision—is an intensification of what it is to be any body, the edge-of-crisis on which we all dwell. With courage and formal acuity, humor and tenderness, Lambeth ‘veils and burns’ a moving debut, a suite of poems that are forthright, adult, and entirely humane.”
Lambeth received her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s creative writing program, where she was also awarded Barthelme and Michener fellowships. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in the Paris Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. A California native, she lives, writes, and teaches in Houston, where she is developing a book of creative nonfiction.