The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded Paperback by Molly McCully Brown

Product Details

• Publisher: Persea Books (2017-03-07)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 80 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780892554782
• Item Weight: 124.74 grams
• Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.24 x 0.64 cm

A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017

Harrowing poems from a dark corner of American history by the winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.  

Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this evocative debut marks the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself.

About the Author

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body—published in the United States in 2020 by Persea Books and in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020), an NEA Big Read selection. Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review,  The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: the University of the South, and Editor-in-Chief of Image Journal.