Nancy Avery Dafoe K'74 recently won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society writing award, The William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for 2016 with her poem, "Entrance Exam."
Written about the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the poem explores both the subjects and the artists of various paintings, allowing the reader to enter the painting through the mind of a real-life observer. Dafoe said the message is that one must know the art and the artist before being able to understand the work.
According to an article in the Syracuse newspaper, The Post-Standard, a judge described her winning poem as "a curious ekphrastic poem that probes the lives of artists in order to reveal the poem's maker."
Thursday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m., Dafoe will be discussing her writing and books at Barnes & Noble in Dewitt, New York.
Dafoe majored in English literature at Kirkland College. Since graduating, she has written several books: An Iceberg in Paradise: A Passage through Alzheimer's, The Misdirection of Education Policy, Breaking Open the Box: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking and Writing Creatively: A Guided Journal to Using Literary Devices, among others. Her book of poetry, Poets Diving in the Night, comes out later this October.
