Poetry collection by Defiance College professor to be published

January 7, 2016

DEFIANCE, Ohio – The latest poetry collection by Dr. Mary Catherine Harper, professor of English at Defiance College, is about to be published. Entitled Some Gods Don’t Need Saints, the collection of lyric poetry is scheduled for release by Finishing Line Press on March 18. The chapbook is a semifinalist in the 2015 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition.

Some Gods Don’t Need Saints speaks of the many ways in which humans interact with the Divine and imagines figures of Divinity talking back to us.

Poet David Radavich says Harper’s collection offers “contemporary explorations of ‘lives of the divine’ from many traditions. Among the personages are Adam, Joan of Arc, Lilith, the Hanged Man from Tarot, and Tiresias.”

Poet Margaret Rozga notes, “With elegantly spare language, Mary Catherine Harper rethinks, examines, and removes underpinnings of commonly held ideas about what is good, what is holy, what makes us whole and wholly at peace with all the natural world.”

Harper’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Old Northwest Review, Cold Mountain Review, Pudding Magazine, and MidAmerica. Her poem “Muddy World” won the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. She organizes and reads poetry at the yearly SwampFire Retreat of artists and writers at 4 Corners Gallery in Angola, Ind., in collaboration with potter and professor emeritus Steve Smith. More about Harper can be found at www.swampfire.org and www.mcharper.faculty.defiance.edu.

Defiance College, chartered in 1850, is an independent, liberal arts institution in Northwest Ohio offering more than 40 undergraduate programs of study as well as graduate programs in education and business. Defiance College has received national recognition for its educational experience of service and engagement. The college website is www.defiance.edu.