(September 7, 2023)
The goal is straightforward: offer appealing ways for students and the community to engage with more poetry.
East Tennessee State University’s “Poetry as Conversation: An Interactive Series” aims to do just that.
On Monday, Sept. 11, at 3 p.m., the university will host a handful of poets at the Reece Museum.
“These award-winning writers create a unique environment by taking away the usual separation of the writer and the audience, and will read a poem at a time each in response to each other and to the audience’s questions and contributions,” ETSU officials said. “The intended effect is to make poetry more accessible rather than the privileged art form it is often taken to be. Designed as a conversation with the audience, this unique approach will elicit questions, poems and comments.”
The poets:
- William Pitt Root. Root’s numerous poetry collections include “Strange Angels,” “White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West” and more. His honors include the Southern Review’s Guy Owen Prize, three Pushcart Prizes and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
- Pamela Uschuk. The author of eight books of poems, including “Crazy Love,” she won the 2010 American Book Award. Among honors she has received: the Struga International Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women.
- Richard Jackson. The author of 17 books of poetry and 12 books of essays, Jackson has a long list of awards. He captured a Fulbright Award and the Order of Freedom from the president of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars.
- Valencia Robin. An interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry and painting, her first collection of poems, “Ridiculous Light,” won Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of 2019. She is a visiting assistant professor in English at ETSU.
- Lacy Snapp. Snapp is a teacher at ETSU and a woodworker, serving as the chair of Programs for the Poetry Society of Tennessee and the assistant director of the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative. Her work has appeared in several publications.
"As we continue to mourn the passing of Dr. Bert C. Bach, I am especially pleased to open our Written Word season with exactly the kind of interactive, student-focused event Dr. Bach surely would have loved,” said Dr. Jesse Graves, ETSU’s poet-in-residence and a professor of English. “We are bringing in three distinguished poets, Jackson, Root and Uschuk, to share the stage with our own Lacy Snapp and Valencia Robin. One of our goals is to make literature and writing as accessible as possible, and we believe ‘Poetry as Conversation’ will offer a fun and engaging way to get acquainted with some new poems and poets.”
ETSU is home to a thriving arts community, hosting dozens of events and exhibitions throughout the year.
