Readings from Fishouse Poetry Anthology Sept. 30

Story posted September 16, 2009

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To spotlight and celebrate the joys of hearing poetry read aloud, readings from From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 30, 2009, at the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center. The reading is open to the public and admission is free. In addition, the event will be webcast live at http://www.bowdoin.edu/video/campus-live.shtml.

The anthology is a new collection that focuses on the balance of poetry on the page and poetry read aloud. Derived from the From the Fishouse Web site, a one-of-a-kind online audio archive devoted to the oral and aural aspects of contemporary American poetry, the print anthology is a jamboree of poetry at its acoustic best.

Co-editors Matt O'Donnell, Camille T. Dungy, and Jeffrey Thomson, along with poets Adrian Blevins, Emily Warn, and Bowdoin Writer-in-Residence Anthony Walton, will read.

The reading is sponsored by the Department of English and From the Fishouse, with generous support from The Bowdoin College Alpha Delta Phi Society Literary Fund.

Adrian Blevins's first collection, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, was published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (Bright Hill Press, 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, Rivendell, The Café Review and many other magazines and journals. Her second collection, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She teaches at Colby College.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award and the Library of Virginia 2007 Literary Award. She is assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press, 2009). Dungy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, and the American Antiquarian Society. A graduate of Stanford University and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, she lives in San Francisco, where she serves as an associate professor in the creative writing department at San Francisco State University. A co-founder of From the Fishouse, she is currently president of the board of directors.

Matt O'Donnell, From the Fishouse editor and executive director, graduated from Holy Cross and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is associate editor of Bowdoin magazine, and an assistant editor of Poets on Poets, an audio archive of contemporary poets reading Romantic-period poems, at Colby College. He founded From the Fishouse with Camille T. Dungy in 2004 to provide up-and-coming poets an outlet to a wider audience, to provide the public with greater access to authors reading their own work, and to provide an educational resource to students and teachers of contemporary poetry. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Greensboro Review, 32 Poems Magazine, and Ecotone.

Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, The Halo Brace (Birch Brook Press, 1998), The Country of Lost Sons (Parlor Press, 2004), Renovation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005), and a new collection, Birdwatching in Wartime (CMU Press, 2009). He has a forthcoming volume of poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel (Green Integer) later this year. Winner of recent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Maine, Farmington.

Anthony Walton is the author of a chapbook of poems, Cricket Weather (Blackberry Books, 1995), and with Michael Harper edited Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Back Bay Books, 1994) and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Vintage, 2000). He is also the author of the memoir Mississippi: An American Journey (Vintage, 1997); and with Kareem Abdul Jabar, Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes (Random House, 2005). Walton's work has appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and Rainbow Darkness. He is writer-in-residence at Bowdoin.

Emily Warn is the author of three collections of poetry, The Leaf Path (1982); The Novice Insomniac (1996); and Shadow Architect (2008), all published by Copper Canyon Press. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, BookForum, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Writer's Almanac. Warn taught creative writing at Lynchburg College, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She recently retired as the editor of poetryfoundation.org.

From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great is available at the Bowdoin College Bookstore and will be on sale at the event.

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