Authors Presenting Reading At W&L

Authors Presenting Reading At W&L

Washington and Lee University is presenting a public reading with authors DW McKinney and Sylvia Jones on Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 6:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium inside Leyburn Library.

McKinney and Jones are former editorial fellows for W&L’s Shenandoah literary magazine, and McKinney currently serves as nonfiction editor of Shenandoah. The upcoming reading is part of Shenandoah’s 75th-anniversary celebrations, and the authors will participate in a panel discussion about inclusive editing at Shenandoah, moderated by Emma Malinak ’25, also on Feb. 11, at 2:50 p.m. in Elrod Commons Room 216.

McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She primarily writes creative nonfiction, often exploring her experience as a Black artist in America. McKinney was named a 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow and is the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her work won Best of the Net in Nonfiction and a 2024 Nevada Press Association Award for Excellence, and appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, TriQuarterly and Narratively.

Jones teaches creative writing part-time at George Washington University, as well as works as an editor at Black Lawrence Press and as a reader for the journal Ploughshares. Jones’s first collection, “Television Fathers,” was released in October 2024 from Meekling Press, and her writing has appeared in Smartish Pace, Sprung Formal, Revolute, DIAGRAM, the Hopkins Review, Poet Lore, Spilt Milk by the Poetry Society of New York, Shenandoah and the Cortland Review. Jones is the recipient of support from the Peaked Hill Trust, Topical Cream, Jack Straw Cultural Center, The Emerging Artist Initiative, OUTWrite DC, Maryland State Arts Council, Poets at the End of the World Collective, Literary Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walters Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Stadler Center for Poetry and the Literary Arts (where she was a 2021-22 fellow). She currently lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland.

The reading is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment. Copies of Jones’s poetry collection, “Television Fathers,” will be available for purchase at the event.