Deaf poet, author and sheep farmer Josephine Dickinson will deliver the 21st annual B. Christopher Bothe Lecture at 8 p.m. April 17 in McDaniel College’s McDaniel Lounge.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410-857-2294.

The author of “Scarberry Hill” (2001) and “The Voice” (2004), Dickinson was born in South London in 1957. Following a childhood illness, she became profoundly deaf overnight at the age of six. She studied classics at Oxford, passed the difficult Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music exam, and built a career as a musician, composer, and teacher, while also writing poetry filled with sound and rhythm. Following a period as a community arts development worker in London, she moved, in 1994, to Alston, a remote town high in the Cumbrian Pennines.

During a reading tour in England, Pulitzer Prize poet Galway Kinnell was given two of Dickinson's books. Her poems made such an impression on him that he passed the books on to his publisher Houghton Mifflin. “Silence Fell,” Dickinson's American debut, draws from her previous collections. The 45 poems are set on a sheep farm in the northern mountains of England and tell the story – in the form of a modern shepherd's calendar -- of her marriage to a Cumbrian sheep farmer and their life together, until his death in 2004. When they met, she was in her 40s and he was in his 80s.

According to an article published in Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dickinson’s marriage had a profound effect. About this transcendent love, she said, “I was living in a new, very visceral, very physical world. Whereas before I had been up in the clouds – attempting imitations of Woodsworth daffodil poems and things like that. Douglas (her husband) brought me down to earth.”

Dickinson continues to write poetry while raising 15 sheep on Scarberry Hill.

In 2006, her poem “There Were Rainbows Every Day” was published in the New Yorker magazine.

The Bothe lecture brings a visiting writer to campus for one day to meet with student writers and to give a public reading and lecture.

Bothe, a member of the Class of 1972, was a poet, award-winning journalist, and printer who died in 1984. Bothe’s family and friends developed the lecture in his memory in 1987.