Book One Lecture with Molly McCully Brown

Bard College at Simon's Rock is pleased to welcome acclaimed author and Simon’s Rock alumna Molly McCully Brown for a public talk reflecting on her award-winning collection of poetry and this year’s Book One selection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded(Persea, 2017). The lecture and Q&A will take place Monday, August 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the McConnell Theater for the Simon’s Rock campus community and the public; a live stream of the event will also be available, free of charge, via Zoom.

Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded is haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born with cerebral palsy, the author immerses herself in this devastating past, giving voice to the patients in the Colony's dormitories, infirmaries, and notorious blind room. For all the horrors it channels, this visionary book uplifts through communion with the natural world and between poem and reader. “Molly McCully Brown's first book of poems is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It is beautiful and devastating." The New York Times

Raised in rural Virginia, Molly McCully Brown is a graduate of Bard College at Simon's Rock, Stanford University, and the University of Mississippi, where she received her MFA. She teaches at Old Dominion University, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Nonfiction, and a member of the MFA Core Faculty. Molly has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vogue, The New York Times, Crazyhorse, and The Yale Review.

How to Join the Book One Lecture Live Stream

• Join directly via Zoom

• Webinar ID: 816 8487 4326

• Join via Phone: +1 646 931 3860

• International numbers available