10/17/2009
On Saturday, October 17 at 8PM, poet Karen Zealand will read from her work at the Allegany Arts Council’s Community Room. Karen Zealand’s collection, The Sniper and the Spotter, won the 2007 Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Acclaimed poet, Stephen Dobyns, who chose Karen's collection for the award, says that the poems "deal with a couple's difficulties coping with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and how a war's psychological damage expands into the civilian world once the sniper returns home." As Dobyns notes, the poems aren't "nice," but "provide us with necessary truths, rather than just the pretty ones."

Previously, Zealand's manuscript, X-Testaments, was 2003 winner of the Elixir Press Chapbook Competition. She is a 2007 recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry. Her manuscript, Friendly Fire, was a 2003 runner-up for the Maryland Artscape Emerging Voices Award. Her poems are widely published in journals and anthologized in The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry and Outerbridge’s retrospective anthology, among others. For more information, please call the Allegany Arts Council at 301-777-ARTS (2787).