Susan de Sola '84, who majored in English at Bryn Mawr, won the eighth annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry for her work Buddy.
de Sola, who makes her home in the Netherlands, traded emails with The Philadelphia Inquirer's John Timpane about the honor, the poem, and Bryn Mawr.
"After Bryn Mawr, de Sola earned a Ph.D. in literature and history at Johns Hopkins. 'I loved Bryn Mawr,' she says. 'It’s a remarkable, highly committed college with an idealistic, but flexible, sense of its own mission which attracts strong individuals. The campus is beautiful. I’ll always be grateful I was able to study there. Whenever I meet another alum I feel a sense of connection, however different we may be.'”
Read the full article on The Inquirer website.
Bryn Mawr is also the setting for a portion of the poem.
… hearing that I was newly single,
he surprised me in my dorm, at posh Bryn Mawr.
He’d travelled all that way by motorbike.
He caused a stir. Not knowing what to do,
I took him to the cafeteria,
big Bud absurd with pint of milk and tray,
and slight young preppy fellows gathered round.
One said to me: “I like him. He reminds me
of guys I used to work with, building, summers.”
Our small buzz of celebrity. We went
to town en masse for pool and dollar beers.
Tall, side-burned Bud in checks and biker leather,
the sum and magnet of our bourgeois dread,
but there was something wholesome to him always.
He slept on my best girlfriend’s floor, without
complaint. I realize now he’d hoped for more.
I didn’t think about the miles he’d traveled,
his long-held dream deferred, or aim… busted.
Read the entire poem and learn more at the Frost Farm Poetry website.
Anassa kata, Susan!