WT Poetry Reading to Put Spotlight on ‘the Everyday’

Copy by Chip Chandler, 806-651-2124, cchandler@wtamu.edu

CANYON, Texas — Extraordinary local writers will be in the spotlight for an upcoming poetry reading at West Texas A&M University.

Chera Hammons, former WT artist in residence, and Dr. Emilee Kinney, who has newly joined WT’s Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages as an assistant professor of English, will read selections of their work at “An Ordinary Happening” at 7 p.m. Sept. 17 in the Sybil B. Harrington Fine Arts Complex Recital Hall.

Admission is free.

“The name ‘an ordinary happening’ comes from one of Chera’s poems from ‘Salvage List,” said Dr. Matthew Harrison, WT’s Wendy and Stanley Marsh 3 Professor of Shakespeare. “I’ve chosen it because each of these poets is carefully attuned to the everyday: the plants and animals we may not notice, the small violences and almost imperceptible beauties of daily life, the wonder and the pain laminated through the ordinary.”

Harrison said both Kinney and Hammons are nature poets who write accessible lyric poems.

“I’ve been teaching Chera’s work for years, because her poem ‘Amarillo’ captures better than anything else what it's like to live here, in a place where we learn to ‘wring beauty/ from anything we could’,” Harrison said. “Students love the emotional precision of Kinney’s work, how she carefully captures the labor of love. 

Hammons is a winner of the 2025 Discovery Price of the Writer’s League of Texas, the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas, and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Goddard College. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere.

Kinnee, a native of Kenockee, Michigan, earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and history from Albion College, an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi. She teaches creative writing and first-year writing courses at WT and has had her work anthologized in “Savor: Poems for the Tongue” and “The Book of Jobs: Poems about Work.” She was a finalist for Driftwood’s 2004 poetry prize and a winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’s 2026 Intro Journals Project.

For information, creativewriting@wtamu.edu.

About West Texas A&M University

West Texas A&M University is a Regional Research University in Canyon, Texas, on a 342-acre residential campus, as well as the Harrington Academic Hall WTAMU Amarillo Center in downtown Amarillo. Established in 1910, the University has been part of The Texas A&M University System since 1990. WT boasts an enrollment of more than 9,000 and offers multiple options for students to graduate and succeed: 65 undergraduate degree programs, including eight associate degrees; and 41 graduate degrees, including an integrated bachelor’s and master’s degree, a specialist degree and three doctoral degrees. WT recently earned a Carnegie Foundation classification as a Research College and University. The Buffaloes are a member of the NCAA Division II Lone Star Conference and offers 16 men’s and women’s athletics programs.

Photo: Poets Chera Hammons, left, and Dr. Emilee Kinney will present "An Ordinary Happening" on Sept. 17.

—WT—