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Associate Professor of English Laurie Lamon, '78, has a "How I Spent My Spring Break" story that rivals the ambitious adventures many Whitworth students undertook during their March hiatus. Lamon traveled to Washington, D.C., where she accepted a $10,000 Witter Bynner Fellowship from U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall – who calls Lamon "an exquisite writer of lyrics, writing a musical poetry that is delicate and pure" – and gave a reading at the Library of Congress. Each year, the country's poet laureate selects two new voices in poetry to receive the national fellowship. In addition to Lamon, Hall selected David Tucker, an editor with the New Jersey Star-Ledger, to receive a 2007 award.
After the Library of Congress fete, Lamon was interviewed by Grace Cavalieri, producer and host of "The Poet and the Poem," a weekly series distributed from the Library of Congress via National Public Radio satellite.
"This is an honor it will take me quite some while to realize," Lamon says. "I prize Donald Hall for his work as a poet and as a man of letters in the truest sense. He has done so much to support writers and to support the freedom and service of the arts."
Lamon is the author of the poetry collection The Fork Without Hunger (CavanKerry Press, 2005). She received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in 2005, a Graves Award in the Humanities in 2002, and a Pushcart Prize in 2001 for her poem "Pain Thinks of the Beautiful Table. "Lamon's work has appeared in the The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Ploughshares and other magazines and journals.
Witter Bynner was an influential early 20th-century poet and translator of the Chinese classic Tao Te Ching. This is the 10th year that Witter Bynner fellowships have been awarded. Two things are asked of the fellows: that each organizes a reading in his or her hometown and that both participate in a reading and recording session at the Library of Congress.
Visit www.whitworth.edu/whitworthtoday for video and audio clips from the awards ceremony.
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