April 11 marked the conclusion of the visiting writer series for the 2016-17 school year. Faculty and students all gathered in the Kranze room on Tuesday night to listen to poet Terry Thaxton read works from her books “Getaway Girl” and “The Terrible Wife.”

  Before she began reading her own poetry, however, Thaxton was joined by Trinity students from the junior and sophomore classes for an open-mic event. Some of the readings included poetry by juniors Kaitlin Gasner, Sumer Sao, Mark Manglardi and Kevin Wang among many others.

 Just this year, Thaxton won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she has another upcoming book called “Mudsong,” which is set to hit the bookshelves in September. Thaxton explained how writing poetry is an extensive process for her. If she is lucky, she can finish a poem within two to three months.  

  “One of the reasons I like poetry is [that] you can do anything you’d like in a poem,” Thaxton said. “The ‘I’ in a poem doesn’t have to be you. You can have the speaker of the poem do anything they couldn’t normally do in real life.”

  She advises students to write about what everyday life has to offer, as if no one before has tried to put into words what you’ve felt, loved and lost.

  Her poem, “Getaway Girl,” which inspired the title of one of her collections, told the story of her dark past with domestic abuse. The poem at first wasn’t easy for her to write, but she felt she had to get it down on paper to share her story with others.

  “My poetry teacher once told me: ‘you’re not a real poet until you write something you’re embarrassed about,’” Thaxton said.

  For her, that embarrassing guilty pleasure happened to be obsessively binging the soap opera General Hospital for 30 years straight.

  The night rounded out with a musical performance by junior George Perkins and sophomore Ikie Evans. They put together a near-impromptu guitar duet called “Sunday Morning Heart” that they composed five minutes before their performance.