Award-Winning Poet to Speak at ASU Writers Conference

SAN ANGELO, TX - Angelo State University will host award-winning poet Jenny Browne, a former Texas Poet Laureate, as the featured speaker for the 28th ASU Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton March 6-7 on the ASU campus.

Browne will give two free public presentations on Thursday, March 6, in the C.J. Davidson Conference Center inside the Houston Harte University Center at 1910 Rosemont Drive:

• 9:30 a.m. - "A Conversation with Jenny Browne"

• 4:30 p.m. - "Reading and Presentation by Jenny Browne"

The two-day conference will also include five free public sessions featuring readings and presentations by 16 guest authors and poets. All of these sessions will be in the Eldon Black Recital Hall inside ASU's Carr Education-Fine Arts Building at 2602 Dena Drive. Profiles of the guest writers and the complete conference schedule are available at angelo.edu/writers-conference.

Browne, also a professor of English and creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, has published five books of poetry and two chapbooks, including "Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems" and the forthcoming "I am Trying to Love the Whole World." She is also the editor of "Texas, Being: A State of Poems."

A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, Browne has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two U.S./U.K. Fullbright Fellowships to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Browne's poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford American, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The Nation and The New York Times. She served concurrent terms as the 2016-18 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

The ASU Writers Conference is dedicated to San Angelo's own best-selling author of Western literature, Elmer Kelton, who passed away in 2009. The author of more than 40 books, Kelton was a seven-time winner of the Western Writers of America's Spur Award and was the first Distinguished Visiting Professor at ASU. The conference is hosted by the Natalie Zan Ryan Department of English and Modern Languages and sponsored by the university with support from the ASU Alumni Association, College of Arts and Humanities, and Guy and Eva Choate.