Ann Neelon received her BA from College of the Holy Cross and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and served in the Peace Corps. She joined the Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State University in 1992.
Professor Neelon is the author of the poetry collection, Easter Vigil, which was chosen by Joy Harjo as the winner of the 1995 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. The poet Denise Levertov wrote of Easter Vigil, “Ann Neelon brings a unique voice to her first book. Her range of personal concerns include the tragedies of the Gulf War, a sojourn in Nicaragua, the Rwandan War, and other episodes of what are called world events, as well as her father’s death, domestic love and the birth of her first child. Throughout, she successfully ignores the current obsession with the confessional. Her long lines, interspersed with very short ones, have a tone unlike anyone else’s. A truly auspicious beginning.”
Professor Neelon’s poetry has also appeared in American Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, the Mid-American Review, Poetry Southeast, Presence, and Sequoia among others journals. She has given numerous readings of her poetry and presented at conferences such as the American Conference for Irish Studies, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, and the Modern Language Association Conference.
In addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate creative writing, literature, humanities, and composition courses at Murray State, professor Neelon served as the director of Murray State’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program from 2010-16. In 2006, she founded New Madrid, the literary journal of Murray State’s MFA program, and served as its editor-in-chief through 2018.
TRIBUTES
When I was a budding creative writing student, one of the first things Ann said to me stemmed from my very first poem. I remember her asking, “Have you read Arthur Rimbaud?” Many years later, when I was finishing graduate school, and by many years I mean a lot since I had become a professional student, one of the last things Ann said to me echoed Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” After our last class, she said: “You’re one of my own children!” This is hilarious and endearing, and I share it with my own students when we read this story to cushion their shock. I am so grateful, and lucky, that Ann Neelon was the one who nurtured my growth as a poet, and I am indebted to her in more ways than I know.
–BJ Wilson, Murray State alumni
*****
Back when I was a newbie assistant professor at Murray State and team-teaching an introductory course in creative writing with Ann Neelon, Ann introduced me to a writing exercise, the goal of which was to get students to look at everyday objects with fresh eyes. The process was one of defamiliarizing, making the presumably commonplace reveal its strangeness. This exercise seems an apt description of Ann Neelon’s work as a poet-teacher. I can’t think of a single encounter with Ann, whether in person or on the page, when I did not come away feeling more awake and more open to life.
When I was at Murray State, some of my most valued friendships were with Ann’s graduate students. They would talk to me for long stretches of time about what Ann was teaching them in and out of the classroom. In these conversations, which often happened as we leaned against the cinder-block walls on the seventh floor of Faculty Hall, I would make a list of subjects to investigate. I was learning from Ann’s students, since, like all master-teachers, she was showing them how to teach each other. And Ann has never been the sort of teacher content to guide her students along well-trodden paths traversing a few groomed acres. Instead, she has constantly directed our attention to the enormity of our world and challenged us to go exploring. Her teaching and her writing grow out of just this sort of global consciousness, from her service in the Peace Corps (and her continued involvement with Peace Corps poets) to teaching abroad with Murray State.
One of the greatest joys of my twenty-some years teaching has been to work with Ann Neelon and others at Murray in building MSU’s low residency MFA program in Creative Writing. It was largely because of Ann’s deep experience in the profession that I felt confident in joining this Herculean endeavor, despite my own lack of experience. And even though she had received fellowships from Stanford University and Yaddo Writers’ Colony, Ann never let on to any difference in our credentials or abilities. In her years directing that MFA program and editing New Madrid, she established a national reputation of excellence for the program and its literary journal. In addition to helping educate a generation of teachers and writers, she created community in western Kentucky, which she succeeded in connecting to a global literary community, by hosting dozens of visiting writers at MSU and by welcoming so many writers—established and aspiring, local and international—into her home.
Among my most cherished memories of the years I was fortunate to spend in Murray are of the dinners Ann hosted at the home she made with Richard, Liam, and Brendan. How welcome she made me and my family feel! Though most of those dinner conversations have receded beyond the reach of my memory, I still hold vividly the feeling of intellectual excitement and warm fellow-feeling they produced—and the shouts of children in the backyard, and the smell of basil on the late summer air. I look forward to continuing these conversations. I know that I will continue to rely upon Ann’s words to help me see the world through fresh eyes—to see its multiform beauty and suffering and strength and endurance.
–George Hovis, Professor of English, SUNY Oneonta
*****
If you’d have told me Ann and I would become great, good friends when I first started teaching at Murray State, I would have asked what planet you just beamed in from. I’m outrageous, profane, and so seedy that on several first-day-of-classes, students asked if I was there to tidy the room before the professor arrived. Ann is measured, scholarly–the epitome of a professor– and would never be confused with the cleaning staff. How we got to be such friends is a head-scratcher. Back in the good ol’ days, English 214: Intro to Creative Writing was team taught, so she and I met at semester’s end to mutually determine grades. I’ll blame our friendship’s beginning on Mr. Nickel. We had oscillated between two grades for a student when Ann said, “This one’s a toss up.”
“Then let’s ask Mr. Nickel.” I pulled one from my pocket, flipped it, but the coin toss landed on my grade preference, not Annie’s.
“Two out of three,” she said.
And she surely took a gamble on me when she asked me to be fiction editor for New Madrid. She gave me full reign on the fiction we published and stood behind me on several picks that the MFA grad students were aghast about. If you’re interested enough to read it, one particularly contentious story was called “Wall Doxey,” a gruesome but darkly humorous piece written from the POV of a child molester. We both worried about repercussions from administration, but I pointed out the University was run by business people who rarely read. The skinny is that under her editorship, New Madrid went from your basic in-house publication to a nationally recognized literary quarterly that garnered a Pushcart Prize. She oversaw the submission growth from around twenty submissions per issue to over six hundred in fiction alone. I won’t even get into the David/Goliath battles she fought with Administration and the printing company, or the hours she devoted to editing/layout of each issue. Of all the recent retirees–myself included– I can’t think of nearly anyone who gave more to Murray State’s stated goal of academic excellence.
Much of what I miss about Murray State revolves around Ann. I still miss walking into her suite and yelling out “dale ray alert, dale ray alert,” and then sitting in her office to rail about Trump or our program’s funding or to just spill out some joke a pal had just emailed.. Ann’s got a developed and ribald sense of humor–which I greatly admire. I miss how she becomes an Irish raconteur after a couple of glasses of wine, and I pay tribute now to the battles she fought to keep the MFA Program afloat with little funding and even less administrative support. She navigated tricky waters– Riley, Martin, and an MFA student with a steel plate in their head who wanted to sue over everything–even the dining menu for the MFA banquet. Those were the days, Annie. I’m most grateful for the goodness in her character that treated me like family and sussed out the better dale ray in me. It’s a rare colleague who can bring out the best in others.
Ann may or may not confirm my rendition of this tale, but here goes: At the end of a spring semester, it was Ann’s and my turn to meet and dine with the visiting writer. We were both swamped with undergraduate portfolios to read and complaining dutifully about that when I asked where the writer was? What was the writer’s name again? I was having a senior moment, and they are as contagious as a yawn. Ann couldn’t quite pull up the name, and to compound things, had misplaced her cell phone. We agreed the writer’s name was Biblical– Eve? Mary? Delilah? Lazarus?– and could rattle off the writer’s books but couldn’t retrieve the name to page over the Curtis Center’s announcement system.
“Blonde hair.” We both agreed on that and on the odd name. Just as we reached our consensus, a group of prospective donors filtered in to be feted by the university in one of the banquet rooms. Who knew western Kentucky had that many blondes? We laughed at the hell we would get if we hauled the wrong person to the reading. I was about to walk over and ask if any of them were the visiting writer, when a blonde woman came over and said, “You look like you’re looking for me. I’m Margaret Lazarus Dean.” That’s what I miss the most about working with Ann — how the best moments were a beautiful conspiracy.
–Dale Ray Phillips, Associate Professor of English (retired 2021), Murray State University
*****
I can’t think of a better friend with whom to have shared my professional life with for thirty years than Ann Neelon. Ann is a deeply caring colleague, whose belief in the ideals of the humanities have made her a great teacher, and a generous participant in the affairs of the Department of English and Philosophy. Apart from her professional life, what you may not know about Ann is that she is a fantastic cook, a mother of two great kids, and a serious Racer basketball fan. Besides continuing to enjoy those pursuits, I hope in retirement that she now has the extra time she needs for the muse to visit her, and to exploit her many talents as a poet. Personally, I will continue to enjoy our regular get-togethers to study Irish poetry, but I know the rest of her colleagues here at Murray State will miss her greatly.
–Dr. Mike Morgan, Professor of English, Murray State University
College of humanities and fine arts 