Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body. With Susannah Nevison, she is co-author of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020). Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review,  The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: the University of the South, and Editor-in-Chief of Image Journal.

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded
Tenth Anniversary Edition
Molly McCully Brown

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017

Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this evocative debut marks the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself. Molly McCully Brown’s poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed—or inflicted—their agony. Yet for all the horrors it channels, Brown’s visionary book uplifts through communion. In her poems, Brown listens to the callers from a dark past and takes on their anguish.

Included in this tenth anniversary edition of the book is a keen and urgent new preface by the poet, as well as afterwords by acclaimed historians Elizabeth Catte and Paul A. Lombardo, disability studies scholar Clare Mullaney, and poets Meg Day and Kiki Petrosino—all of which put the collection in fascinating context for both new and returning readers. Already an essential book of the twenty-first century, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded remains as vital and timely as when it first appeared.

“Molly McCully Brown’s first book of poems… is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It arrives as if clutching a spray of dead flowers. It is beautiful and devastating.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“When poetry gives voice to those who have no voice—those who are dead, marginalized, or ignored—it helps resurrect lives from oblivion. Such poems are called “poems of witness.” Molly McCully Brown’s superb collection exemplifies this form.”—Anya Silver, The Christian Century

“Molly McCully Brown’s fierce and lyric debut. . . .is emphatic: Virginians in particular and Americans in general cannot turn away from the ugliness in our identity, from an awareness of the lives upon which our lives were built. We must locate ourselves in the darkest rooms of our history, or we can never hope to see beyond them.”—Laura Eve Engel, Oxford American

“While the characters it presents are imagined, [Brown’s] book shares the mission and spirit of great documentary poetry sequences like Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. . . .. It’s a book that makes us feel the nearness of events we might like to chalk up to ancient history.”—Joe Stacksteder, The Kenyon Review

Paperback / $20.00 (Can $28.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-648-0 / 120 pages / Poetry