Jackie Bartley of the Hope College English faculty has been awarded a poetry residency at the Ragdale Foundation for the forthcoming summer session, which will run during July.

Ragdale is a nonprofit, internationally acclaimed artists' community located 30 miles north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Ill., on the grounds of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw's Arts and Crafts style home built in 1897.

Each year, Ragdale provides residencies for nearly 200 emerging and established artists, writers and composers from all over the world, providing them with peaceful, uninterrupted time to work. Established in 1976, Ragdale is subsidized by the foundation and its supporters, both corporate and private.

Acceptance to Ragdale is highly competitive. Residency recipients are chosen through an application process, with primary emphasis placed on anonymous evaluation of the applicant's work sample by professionals in each genre.

Bartley, an adjunct assistant professor of English and cutter/draper in the department of theatre, is the author of six books of poems, the most recent of which is "Women Fresh from Water," published by Finishing Line Press this spring. Her work has appeared in "Image," "Gulf Coast," "Poet Lore," "The Evansville Review" and many other journals, and four of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She previously held Ragdale residencies in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003.

A member of the Hope faculty since 1989, she earned a B.S. from Clarion University in Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University.