On Wednesday, October 26 at 4:30 p.m., poet Janice N. Harrington will be reading from her work at the Author’s Corner on the second floor of the Illini Union Bookstore.
Harrington’s most recent book is The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, published by BOA Editions. According to a blurb on the publisher’s page for the book:
The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers. What does it mean to be a nurses’ aide in a nursing home, the lowest of the low, the typically-female worker who provides physical care for the devalued bodies of the elderly? What is it to live one’s remaining life on a county ward as an indigent elder? The poems show women in motion: they lift bodies, push wheelchairs, give treatments, and perform the myriad tasks of caretaking. The poems show aides as anonymous figures laboring under routines, time clocks, and a distant medical hierarchy. They also tell the stories of how the nursing home industry reshapes lives, bodies, and identities of both aides and the aged.
Harrington teaches in the Creative Writing program at UIUC, and is also the author of Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) and several children’s books, Going North, The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County, and Roberto Walks Home.
Some more resources on Harrington and her work:
- An interview with Harrington from Claremont Colleges Digital Library
- An interview from The Brown Bookshelf
- An interview from the Poetry Society of America
