James Allen Hall

FREDERICK, Md.—Award-winning poet James Allen Hall will read from his debut collection of poems Nov. 6 at 6:30 p.m. in the Marx Center at Hood College.

The reading, which is part of Hood’s annual colloquium series, is funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session and a book signing.

Now You’re the Enemy is a powerful collection of poems that shows a family in the aftermath of violence. Hall explores themes of loss, the intersection of grief and desire and the ways in which history, art and politics shape personalities.

The book won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award, the Helen C. Smith Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the George Garrett Award for New Writers from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review and The American Poetry Review, among others.

Hall, an associate professor of English at Washington College, earned a master of fine arts degree from Bennington College and a doctoral degree in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston.

The final fall colloquium event is a lecture Dec. 3 by Laurie Taylor-Mitchell, former associate professor at Hood, who will discuss politics and art in Machiavelli’s Florence.

The Hood College Center for the Humanities was founded in 1990 by a group of faculty members from Hood’s humanities departments—art, English, foreign languages, history and political science, music, philosophy and religion. During its more than 20-year existence, the Center for the Humanities has presented a distinguished roster of events and hosted internationally renowned speakers. In 1999, Hood was the recipient of a major challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which helps provide for an annual lecture series and an NEH visiting scholar.

For more information about the colloquium series, contact Katy Fulfer, NEH Libman Professor of the humanities, at fulfer@hood.edu.