Donna has rarely been without a book — or two, or three. For as long as those who know her can remember, she has moved through the world with a novel on the nightstand, a collection of poems in her bag, and an essay half-finished on the kitchen table. Reading, for Donna, has never been a pastime. It has been a way of paying attention.

As a professor of English at the University of North Georgia for more than three decades, she brought that conviction into every classroom — that literature is not a subject to be surveyed but a conversation to be entered. Her students learned to read the way she does: carefully, personally, with full awareness that a great book changes the reader who meets it.

This section of the site gathers her reflections on books, poems, and essays that have mattered — works she returns to, works that reframed how she saw everything after, and works she has spent a career pressing into other people’s hands. It is not a catalog. It is a record of a reading life.