BRIDGEWATER, Va. – Bridgewater College Provost Leona Sevick recently published her second collection of poems, inspired by her disorientation of her move from Maryland to Virginia.
“I’d been a Marylander my whole life,” Sevick said “I raised my kids there, worked there, and the only time I ever left was for a year abroad during college. So when I took this job and moved to Virginia, it was disorienting in ways I didn’t expect.”
When she left her lifelong home in Maryland nearly a decade ago to accept a new academic post in Virginia, the transition was anything but seamless. The relocation became a source of inspiration — and ultimately shaped her latest poetry collection.
“I turned to poetry as a way to make sense of it.” Sevick said.
That sense of displacement became the foundation for the poems that would later appear in her newest collection, one that took seven years to complete. She began writing it in 2016, the same year she settled in Bridgewater.
“How long will it be before I start feeling like this place is our home,” states the poem “Virginia Is for Lovers.”
Sevick’s second collection, “The Bamboo Wife,” was named after a trip to South Korea in which she found the bamboo body pillow which is nicknamed the bamboo wife.
Reviewers on Goodreads state that Sevick “writes beautifully” and call her book a “stunning new collection.” The editor of The Birmingham Review states that he read the collection twice the day he received it.
Some students at Bridgewater college could relate to her poems. Junior Vivi Liquorie moved from Maryland to North Carolina in her senior year of high school.
“I think some of the poems in her collection discuss the feeling and thought of moving to a new place so I could personally relate to that after experiencing it,” Vivi said.
The collection, which ultimately grew beyond its initial theme, still has traces of that transitional period. Several pieces examine the tension between familiarity and change, comfort and uncertainty — emotions Sevick links directly to the move.
“It’s a kind of disorientation you can only really know if you’ve uprooted yourself after decades in one place,” Sevick said.
“Each time I return to this house that doesn’t feel like my house, I enter like a thief or a victim,” states the poem “Homecoming.”
Sevick trained as a literary critic, and spent years studying American literature and teaching others to analyze poetry but never dared to write her own. That changed when she jotted down a poem on a restaurant napkin, shared it with a colleague, and soon after won a national contest.
Since then, she has published two full-length collections, both written slowly due to the demands of her career in academic leadership. She admits her position as provost leaves little free time.
“I’m a sporadic writer,” Sevick said. “Most of my poems are born in the early mornings or weekends. It takes me years to build a book, but I’m not in a hurry.”
Looking back, she sees the move to Virginia not just as a professional step but as a personal turning point.
For readers, she hopes the book resonates with anyone navigating transition — especially women balancing family, career and creativity.
To learn more about her and her collections visit her website, https://leonasevick.com/
