Tara J. Hart

​​Tara Hart is a Professor of English, Arts, and Humanities, the Coordinator of Creative Writing, and the Chair of the Humanities Department at Howard Community College. She serves as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of HoCoPoLitSo (Howard County Poetry and Literature Society), a community partner-in-residence at HCC. She is a recipient of The Chair Academy's 2006 International Exemplary Leader Award recognizing her ability to advance academic and administrative leadership. In 2011, she was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry with the publication of "Patronized" in the journal Little Patuxent Review. She has served as a host of HoCoPoLitSo's TV show The Writing Life and as a director of staged readings and an actor with HCC's Arts Collective. Her scholarship has focused on drama, particularly the plays of Sam Shepard and Samuel Beckett, as well as on the concept of landscape in the literature of early 20th-century American women writers. Her chapter, "Still Points: Mary Austin's Compositions and Explanations," is published in Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, University of Nevada Press.​