News Releases

May 4, 2010
For Immediate Release
For additional information: 
Barbara Kerr, APR
Executive Director of
Communications and Marketing
Telephone: 360-992-2921
Email: bkerr@clark.edu

 

P Is for Penelope

Penelope Scambly Schott, winner of the 2008 Oregon Book Award for poetry for “A Is for Anne: 
Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth”, will visit Clark College on Tuesday,
May 11 as guest lecturer in the 2009-2010 Columbia Writers Series

 

Penelope Scambly Schott VANCOUVER, Wash. – Author Penelope Scambly Schott will be the next guest speaker in Clark College’s renowned Columbia Writers Series.  Schott will appear on Tuesday, May 11 from noon to 1 p.m. in the Penguin Student Lounge, located in Clark’s Penguin Union Building.  The event is free and open to the public.

Clark College is located at 1933 Fort Vancouver Way, Vancouver.  Driving directions and parking maps are available at www.clark.edu/maps.  Information about the Columbia Writers Series is available at http://www.clark.edu/special/cws/.

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of a published novel, five chapbooks, and seven full-length books of poetry.  Her verse biography A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for poetry.  Her newest books are Six Lips (2010) and Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía (2009).

Schott has worked as a home health aide, a donut maker in a cider mill, an artist’s model, and always a college professor.  After many years in rural New Jersey, she moved to Portland, Oregon.  She is an active member of several poetry groups – the Pearls, the Tabus, the Word Sisters, and The Cool Women Poets of New Jersey -- who will be making a third trip to Oregon and reading in Portland on Thursday, May 20.   Her poetry is included on their recent CD The Cool Women Collect Themselves. 

She has been awarded fellowships by the New Jersey Council on the Arts and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Vermont Studio Center; and most recently at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.  She has taught poetry workshops all over the country.

What the critics are saying about Penelope Scambly Schott

On A is for AnneMistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth:

Meticulously researched, marvelously rendered, A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth is biography written with the flame of poetry. Anne Hutchinson grapples with injustice and confining religious conformity. This wonderful book is as much a parable for our own frightened and frightening times as a depiction of a period blurred by the mists of history.

—Robert Cooperman

On Six Lips:

Insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language, Schott summons deft images from the natural world as she confronts the great themes of literature: death, love and the human experience, its duplicity and grace; this is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be.—Colette Inez

On Crow Mercies:

There's a knife sharpener in California who ends his notes Stay sharp and 
shiny
. This is what Penelope Schott does with words, images, stories, memories—sharp! shiny!—she is not afraid to startle or jolt. A reader feels electrified.—Naomi Shihab Nye

####