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Mary Ann Samyn
Associate Professor MFA, University of Virginia, 1996 237 Colson Hall Tel: 293-9730 Fax: 293-5380 Email: MaryAnn.Samyn@mail.wvu.edu |
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Specializations:
Creative Writing Poetry
Mary Ann Samyn is the author of four collections of poetry: Purr (2005), Rooms by the Sea, winner of the 1994 Kent State UP/Wick Chapbook Prize, Captivity Narrative, winner of the 1999 Ohio State UP/The Journal Prize, and, most recently, Inside the Yellow Dress, a 2001 New Issues Press/Green Rose Selection. Her poems have appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, The Ohio Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Mississippi Review, The Bitter Oleander, Pleiades, the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation, and elsewhere. She received her MA from Ohio University and her MFA from The University of Virginia where she was a Hoyns Fellow. A 2001 Creative Artist Grant recipient from ArtServe Michigan, Samyn has also been awarded the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America. In addition, she has served as the poetry editor for the national literary magazine Controlled Burn and as poet-in-residence for the COOR Intermediate School district in Michigan. She also teaches each summer at The Controlled Burn Seminar for Young Writers (ages 15-20), and is the founder and director of Oakland University’s Far Field Retreat for Writers (www2.oakland.edu/english/farfield). Her poems are interested in the experience of and interplay between language and silence, between what can be said and what cannot/ should not/ won’t. Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison, Nancy Drew and Alice in Wonderland, Richard Serra and Eva Hesse, all make guest appearances in Samyn’s poems, which aim to work on as many “registers” as possible, mixing the colloquial and the “poetic,” to mirror the complexity of everyday life and the rush of experience.