WEST LIBERTY, WV, March 20, 2015 — The Hughes Lecture Series is pleased to announce that author Jeanne Bryner will visit on Monday, March 23 and Tuesday, March 24.
Bryner was born in Appalachia and grew up in Newton Falls, Ohio. A practicing registered nurse, she is a graduate of Trumbull Memorial’s School of Nursing and Kent State University’s Honors College.
She has received writing fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council (1997, 2007), and Vermont Studio Center.
Bryner will meet with the nursing faculty and students at 3 pm, Monday, in Room 314, Campbell Hall of Health Sciences.
At 7:30 p.m., Monday, she will give the formal Hughes Lecture in the Boyle Conference Center. Open to the public, the lecture will be followed by refreshments.
At noon, Tuesday, Bryner will address the public at Ohio County Public Library”s Lunch with Books program. She also will give an afternoon workshop that day with students studying creative writing (ENG 361).
Later Tuesday, she will complete her residency with a public reading of her prose and poetry at 7:30 p.m., March 24 in the Alumni Room and refreshments will be served.
Bryner’s poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, Kentucky, and Edinburgh, Scotland. With the support of Hiram College’s Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities, her nursing poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed by Verb Ballets, Cleveland, Ohio.
She has a new play, Foxglove Canyon, and her books in print are Breathless, Blind Horse: Poems, Eclipse: Stories, Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated and Remembered, No Matter How Many Windows, The Wedding of Miss Meredith Mouse, and Smoke: Poems, which received an American Journal of Nursing 2012 Book of the Year Award.
According to Cortney Davis of The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing: “The poems in Jeanne Bryner’s Smoke reveal her to be an angel of mercy not only in her work with patients but also in her ability to create poems that comfort and guide us as we face universal fears: sickness, personal and societal abuse, family tragedy, physical pain and emotional longing. Bryner intertwines striking images and perfect metaphors in poems that use nursing as a lens through which to view the world of healthcare as well as the lives of families, communities, and the art of writing. Because she has witnessed moments only a nurse might, she is able to plunge through the poem’s surface event to reach the ineffable. Her poems dig deep, reaching what Emily Dickinson called “the zero at the bone.”
The Hughes Lecture Series was begun in the 1970s by former WLU professor, Dr. Raymond Grove Hughes, a beloved teacher who joined West Liberty in 1931. Thanks to his endowment, the series has brought a wide range of speakers to the University, including: Dr. Ralph Abernathy, confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Eugene McCarthy, U. S. Senator and presidential candidate in 1968; and John Simon, noted film critic and West Virginia writer and NASA scientist Homer Hickam.
For more info contact Dr. Peter Staffel at staffelp@westliberty.edu, or x8193.