Allison Wilkins, assistant professor of English, has published her first book Girl Who by CW Books.
“I am very excited,” said Wilkins, who has taught at University of Lynchburg for six years. “Many of the poems in the book were written in my first years at LC.”
CW Books says, “Allison Wilkins’s Girl Who is held together by the collection’s title: each poem in the sequence follows the phrase “Girl Who,” as if filling out an ellipsis, and we follow this girl’s actions and interactions as she sets out to define herself. The poems trace the narrow edge between anonymity and identity, between calm and instability, between the easy contentment of connection and a more satisfying, if unsettling state of disconnection. Wilkins’s poems seek desire in terms that are both sensual and surreal. Whether collecting crows, pebbles, or light, or interrogating a scarecrow or a potted plant, Girl Who speaks in spare lyrical outbursts that accumulate into defiant song.”
Wilkins, who chairs the Thornton Readings, will read from her book on March 18 at 8 p.m. in Sydnor Performance Hall, Schewel Hall.