Rodgers Forge resident and Towson University professor Leslie Harrison is a semi-finalist for the prestigious National Book Award for poetry.
The poems in The Book of Endings “try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence—the death of the author’s mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky,” according to the publisher.
According to the National Book Foundation, she was born in Germany and raised in New Hampshire. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and The University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Subtropics, Pleiades, Orion and elsewhere.
The finalists will be announced Oct. 4, and the winners will be named on Nov. 15.