October 15, 2007
Lyon College News Bureau

A poet whose work has been called “heart-stopping and heartbreaking,” will soon visit Lyon College as part of the Contemporary Writers Series.

Jo McDougall is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, “Dirt” and “Satisfied with Havoc.” She is also completing a prose memoir, “Daddy’s Money.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 23, she’ll present remarks on the art of writing in Bevens Music Room, and later that that evening at 7:30 p.m., she’ll host a reading in the same location.

Among her awards are an Academy of American Poets prize, a DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writing award, and the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence.

One critic called McDougall’s poetry “heart-stopping and heartbreaking – the embodiment of what Stanley Kunitz calls ‘an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.’” Another said, “Jo McDougall writes a lean stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit.”

McDougall grew up on a rice farm in the Arkansas Delta, near DeWitt. Her husband also came from an agrarian background. When they went to the University of Arkansas, they majored in home economics and agriculture, since they expected to spend the rest of their lives as rice farmers. But as often happens when you’ve made plans, life intervened. In her forties, McDougall returned to the University to get an MFA.

Since that time she has taught Creative Writing at Northeast Louisiana University, Pittsburgh State University at Pittsburgh, Kansas, Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has held three McDowell Colony Fellowships.

The Arkansas Repertory Theatre produced, “Towns Facing Railroads,” a dramatic presentation of her work, and some of her poems were adapted for the film “Emerson County Shaping Dream.” Individual poems appear in Garrison Keillor’s “Good Poems for Hard Times,” Ted Kooser’s  “American Life in Poetry,” and such journals as the  Hudson Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Midwest Quarterly, and New Letters.

McDougall is an Arkansas native who presently resides in Kansas. Before she retired, she directed the creative writing program at Pittsburg State University.

The Lyon College Contemporary Writers Series, the Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the Heasley Prize Reading Series, all provide outstanding opportunities to anyone interested in reading – or writing – fiction, poetry, drama and creative non-fiction.

, initiated the Contemporary Writers Series in 1991 when she joined the faculty, and the series immediately began drawing both Lyon students and members of the community to hear authors read from, and speak about, their work.

For more information on the Contemporary Writers Series, contact Lyon’s Writer-in-Residence, Andrea Hollander Budy, at ahbudy@lyon.edu.

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Jo McDougall