The Spring 2011 Dinner/Lecture featured award-winning poet, writer, and psychologist Judson Mitcham.

The Friends program was held on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, beginning with a book signing and wine reception at 6:00 pm, followed by dinner and a lecture at 7:00 pm., in Barton College's Hardy Alumni Hall.

A Georgia native, Mitcham was not formally trained as a writer but rather as a psychologist, earning his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in psychology from the University of Georgia. He taught psychology at the Fort Valley State University in Georgia from 1974 until his retirement as associate professor in 2004. Yet his poignant, powerful award-winning poetry and novels have led to adjunct professor positions in creative writing at the University of Georgia as well as at Emory University, where he has directed the Summer Writers' Institute.

He has held fellowships from the national Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. He currently teaches creative writing at Mercer University and in the MFA program at Georgia College and State University.

Mitcham's poetry has been published in a variety of literary journals, including Harper's, Georgia Review, Chattahoochee Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. For his first poetry collection, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (1991), Mitcham received the Devins Award and was named Georgia Author of the Year. Writing in Library Journal, Barbara Hoffer says of the collection, "Mitcham writes ruminative poems that gather power slowly like an oncoming storm, then stab you through the heart with a particularly telling image....There are no histrionics here, no effort to shock or amuse or seduce; just beautifully realized poetry that uses language as it should be used" (Dec. 1991, p. 150).

He then turned to fiction with his debut novel, The Sweet Everlasting (1996), which was awarded the Townsend Prize for Fiction (Georgia's oldest and most prestigious literary award) and also garnered Mitcham his second Georgia Author of the Year award. The Sweet Everlasting has been compared to the work of William Kennedy and Cormac McCarthy. Mitcham then returned to poetry with his published collection, This April Day (2003).

His second novel, Sabbath Creek (2004), also won the Townsend Prize, earning Mitcham distinction as the only writer thus far to twice receive the award. Patrick Sullivan in Library Journal describes the work as "Mitcham's masterfully drawn, emotionally rich gem of a second novel....[It is] a powerfully realized, deeply satisfying novel" (March 15, 2004, p. 108).

In 2007, Mitcham published his latest poetry collection, A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New, which is composed of forty new works as well as previously published poems.

In The New Georgia Encyclopedia Online entry for Judson Mitcham, Hugh Ruppersburg sums up Mitcham's work: "In both his novels and his poetry, Mitcham's elegiac voice looks backwards with fondness and discernment on a personal and regional past slipping rapidly beyond reach."

Mitcham resides with his wife, Jean, in Macon, Georgia.