IPRH is pleased to announce that Professor Janice Harrington (Creative Writing, English) will hold the 2016 IPRH-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship. 

A poet and children’s author, Janice N. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. Her children’s books include The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County, Going North, and Busy Busy Little Chick, all from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.   In 2016, she will publish two books: a book of poetry called Primitive, about the art and life of the African American painter Horace H. Pippin, and a verse novel for children called Catching a Storyfish.

Professor Harrington will spend four weeks this summer in residence at Ragdale, an artists’ and writers’ retreat located in Lake Forrest, Illinois, pursuing work on an in-progress book of poems currently titled Domestic Arts, which draws on African American history, memory, and culture to trouble narrow conceptions of women’s work. Please join IPRH in offering congratulations to Professor Harrington!