Poet Virginia Hamilton Adair ’33 Featured in Oliver Sacks’s New Book
The Nominating Committee has begun its triennial task of selecting the next president to lead the Alumnae Association. The committee strongly encourages alumnae to participate by recommending qualified candidates. The president’s responsibilities include setting priorities for programs and the budget, representing the Association on the College’s Board of Trustees, communicating with College President Lynn Pasquerella ’80 and senior staff, overseeing the policy function of the Association board, evaluating the executive director, serving as a role model for students and alumnae, and maintaining a strong Alumnae Association with an increasingly global reach. The Nominating Committee asks that alumnae submit candidates’ names—with details about their qualifications—by email (radleyemes@gmail.com), by phone (202-6698533), or by mail (Radley Emes, 1441 Q St. N.W., Washington, DC 20009).
Virginia Hamilton Adair ’33 wrote her first poem at the age of two, yet didn’t publish her first book of poetry until she was eighty-three and blind, seven years before her death. The New York Review of Books described Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems as “extraordinarily moving,” and critics compared Adair to Eliot and Frost, one going so far as to exclaim that she was “the best American poet since Wallace Stevens.” Last year, best-selling author and professor of neurology Oliver Sacks published the book Hallucinations (Knopf ), in which he relates stories of both his patients’ and his own visions in order to illuminate the inner workings of the mind. Adair features prominently in the book, as late in life she developed Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex hallucinations. Dictating her visions, which were recorded in a journal, she describes being “treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit.”
alumnaematters
Association President Nominations Sought
Mount Holyoke European Alumnae Symposium September 20-22, 2013 Join us as we explore cultural, religious, and political topics with our presenters including special guests President Lynn Pasquerella ’80 and Professor Stephen Jones, chair of Russian and Eurasian studies. Visit alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/warsaw for more information and to register.
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