Join the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program to celebrate visiting award-winning poet Mary Ann Samyn’s new collection, The Return from Calvary (42 Miles Press). Mary Ann will read with Professor Timothy Donnelly, recipient of a Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award and author most recently of Chariot, published in 2023 by Wave Books.

Following the reading, both poets will participate in a Q&A and sign copies of their books.

On Mary Ann Samyn’s The Return from Calvary:
What good is suffering? Why does it happen? How do we go on? In her much-anticipated seventh collection, Mary Ann Samyn brings her eye for beauty, however fleeting, and her signature wit to bear on these questions. “The Book of Grief trails off, or I lose my place,” she writes, looking up, out, in, away—, by turns haunted or reassured by dreams and memories, kept company by nature. “Will there ever be comfort again in this life?” Mary Ann asks, “God so loved the world, we are told. / I walk the neighborhood where I left off being a child. / There is nothing doing, save a light breeze.”

About the Poets:

Mary Ann Samyn is the author seven full-length collections of poetry: Captivity Narrative (The Journal Prize/Ohio State University Press, 1999), Inside the Yellow Dress, Purr, Beauty Breaks In (2001, 2005, 2009, all from New Issues ), My Life in Heaven (FIELD Poetry Prize/Oberlin College Press, 2013), Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance (42 Miles Press Poetry Award, 2018), and The Return from Calvary (also from 42 Miles, 2025) . Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, FIELD, Laurel Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English in the MFA program at West Virginia University and can be found on Substack where she writes Cake & Poetry (https://maryannsamyn.substack.com). She lives in West Virginia and in her home state of Michigan.

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poems have been widely translated and anthologized, and have appeared in such periodicals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere, as well as in multiple Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Donnelly is a recipient of Columbia University’s Distinguished Faculty and Faculty Mentoring Awards, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize, as well as fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the New York State’s Writers Institute, and the T. S. Eliot Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.