Elizabeth Spires, Co-Director
Elizabeth Spires
Elizabeth Spires, Co-Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, holds the Chair for Distinguished Achievement (with her husband, the novelist Madison Smartt Bell) at Goucher College where she is a Professor in the English Department. Born in 1952 in Lancaster, Ohio, and raised in Circleville, she graduated from Vassar College and Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Spires is the author of six collections of poetry, including Globe (1981), Annonciade (1989), Worldling (1992), Swan’s Island (1997), Now the Green Blade Rises (2004), and The Wave-Maker (2008). She is also the author of several books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst and I Heard God talking To Me: William Edmonton and His Stone Carvings.
Professor Spires is the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Ohioana Book Awards, and the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association. Professor Spires is also the editor of The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism and Occasional Prose by Josephine Jacobsen.
Eleanor Kratz Denoon (1915 - 2010)
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The founding donor of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing was Eleanor Kratz Denoon, class of 1936. She was a tireless champion of literature, a lifelong advocate for peace, and a beloved alumna of Goucher College. |