3 Emerging Writers: Virginia Poets
On Wednesday, February 8th, we were proud to welcome Leah Naomi Green, Lisa J. Parker,
and Valencia Robin to campus to speak to students and the public about their writing. The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia co-editor and former ETSU Basler Chair, Amy Wright, was scheduled to introduce the
poets.
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The 3 Emerging Writers:

Leah Naomi Green
Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of a 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her chapbook, The Ones We Have, received the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Ecotone, and Pleiades. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is currently the Sherwood Anderson Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Guilford College. Green teaches Environmental Studies and English at Washington and Lee University. She lives in the mountains of Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow food.

Lisa J. Parker
Lisa J. Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her first book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 ASA Weatherford Award, her second book, The Parting Glass, won the 2021 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and her work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her photography has been on exhibit in NYC and published in several arts journals and anthologies. She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly 20 years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her work may be found at www.wheatpark.com.

Valencia Robin
Valencia Robin's debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (2018), was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of 2019. A Cave Canem Fellow, Robin’s honors include a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry. A painter as well as a poet, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan where she also cofounded GalleryDAAS. Robin lives in Charlottesville, Virginia where she teaches.

Amy Wright
Wright coordinates the Creative Writing Program at Austin Peay State University, where she also teaches writing, and serves as the senior editor for Zone 3 journal and the nonfiction editor for Zone 3 Press. She has been awarded two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, an Individual Artist Fellowship through Humanities Tennessee, and a fellowship through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been invited to read or lead workshops nationally and internationally from Boulder, Colorado to Reykjavík, Iceland, and many places between, including Savannah College of Art and Design, Massey University of New Zealand, and the University of Denver—where she earned her Ph.D.