T
he Governor’s Academy welcomed Brittany Perham ’99, back to campus on Thursday, as the featured author of the annual Common Book Day. Currently, Brittany is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Students read and discussed her first collection of poems, The Curiosities, in English class prior to her arrival to campus and were invited to attend two poetry workshops where Brittany spoke about various types of poetry and engaged the students in poetry writing activities. Students were asked to share the poetry they had written and encouraged to ask questions. Following the workshops, Brittany addressed the entire student body in the Performing Arts Center where she shared several of her poems, spoke about her experience as a poet and a teacher, and her time spent at the Academy as a student.
Upon her graduation from Governor Dummer Academy, Brittany attended Tufts University and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and she has twice been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship given by POETRY. Before joining the creative writing department at Stanford, she taught Poetry Writing and American Literature at James Madison University and at the University of Virginia.
