Kathleen Waters Sander's new book, Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age, describes a Baltimore railroad heiress who pushed "to advance her vision for women’s education and to enhance the role of women within society through the cofounding of The Bryn Mawr School, the establishing of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the transformation of Bryn Mawr College ... ." Sander holds a doctorate in American studies from the University of Maryland.

Andrew Porter, who has taught writing at Johns Hopkins, Goucher and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in recent years, has won the Flannery O'Connor Award in short fiction for The Theory of Light and Matter. Porter, who now teaches at Trinity University, will be back for a reading at UMBC on Wednesday (details in the Read Street calendar).

A Little Breast Music is a chapbook of poems by Shirley J. Brewer, who studied creative writing after a career as a speech therapist. It's published by the University of Baltimore's Passager Books, which promotes the works of older writers.