{"id":31551,"date":"2017-01-25T10:20:40","date_gmt":"2017-01-25T15:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=31551"},"modified":"2017-02-03T08:53:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T13:53:45","slug":"sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Kennedy, professor of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, brings historical fiction to Writers Read"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cHistorical Fiction, Tudor England, Gardening, Herbs and Poetry\u201d reads the tagline on Dr. Sarah Kennedy\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/sarahkennedybooks.com\/\">website<\/a>. Kennedy \u2013 poet, novelist, and Mary Baldwin University professor \u2013 is the featured author in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.emu.edu\/language-and-literature\/writers-read\/\">Writers Read<\/a> series at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Kennedy will read from and comment on her work Thursday, Feb. 2, at 6:30 p.m. in Common Grounds coffeehouse.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"highlight highlight-right\">Learn about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.emu.edu\/language-and-literature\/writers-read\/\">upcoming Writers Read events<\/a>.<\/aside>\n<p>Kennedy teaches creative writing, Renaissance literature and Shakespeare at Mary Baldwin. She has won the Cleveland State University Press Open Competition<em>,<\/em> the Elixir Press Prize in Poetry<em>,<\/em> and grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.<\/p>\n<p>Professor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.emu.edu\/personnel\/people\/show\/medley\">Mike Medley<\/a>, chair of the Language and Literature Department, says he was first impressed to discover \u201ca scholar at a neighboring institution who had published so much poetry and fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy poems ranged in subject from the painfully personal to the distantly narrative, and as I grew older, those autobiographical tendencies waned,\u201d Kennedy wrote for literary blog \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/layeredpages.com\/\">Layered Pages<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kennedy\u2019s time in the U.K. studying the lives of eighteenth century women was a pivotal experience in her writing career.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was particularly interested in women\u2019s spiritual and domestic lives, and this curiosity led me to read the medieval mystics\u201d she says. \u201cAll of these women suffered for their beliefs, and I wanted to know how ordinary women might have coped with the great changes in England as it shifted from being a Roman Catholic to a Protestant country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This research inspired her to enter the historical fiction field, and in 2013 she published <em>The Altarpiece<\/em> (Knox Robinson Publishing), the first in a series about a young nun thrust into a hostile political-religious environment under King Henry VIII\u2019s rule.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDespite the fact that the novel is set in the 16th century,\u201d says Medley, \u201csome of the themes are very contemporary: violence against women, women&#8217;s struggle to exercise the full range of their gifts and the universal questioning of faith in the face of disease, violence, betrayal and death.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople have to have stories to make sense of their lives,\u201d said Kennedy in a 2013 interview. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s one of the reasons we crave fiction; we need to shape events in such a way that they conform to our notions of right and wrong, of justice and fairness\u2014and to our notions of the reality of danger and evil.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>NEXT WRITERS READ EVENT:<\/strong> Novelist Ken Yoder Reed will read Feb. 16, 2017,\u00a0 at 6:30 p.m. in Common Grounds.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cHistorical Fiction, Tudor England, Gardening, Herbs and Poetry\u201d reads the tagline on Dr. Sarah Kennedy\u2019s website. Kennedy \u2013 poet, novelist, and Mary Baldwin University professor \u2013 is the featured author <a href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/\" target=\"_self\" class=\"more-link\">... read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">about Sarah Kennedy, professor of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, brings historical fiction to Writers Read<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7931,14715,17564,356],"tags":[10786],"feature":[17426,17241],"class_list":["post-31551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-campus-life","category-events","category-language-and-literature","tag-mike-medley","feature-myemu-feature","feature-news-feature"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sarah Kennedy, professor of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, brings historical fiction to Writers Read - EMU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sarah Kennedy, professor of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, brings historical fiction to Writers Read - EMU News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cHistorical Fiction, Tudor England, Gardening, Herbs and Poetry\u201d reads the tagline on Dr. Sarah Kennedy\u2019s website. Kennedy \u2013 poet, novelist, and Mary Baldwin University professor \u2013 is the featured author\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"EMU News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/EasternMennonite\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-01-25T15:20:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-02-03T13:53:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2017\/01\/sarah-kennedy-1000px.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"667\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@EMU_News\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@EMU_News\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2017\/sarah-kennedy-professor-renaissance-literature-shakespeare-brings-historical-fiction-writers-read\/\",\"name\":\"Sarah Kennedy, professor of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, brings historical fiction to Writers Read - 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