By Levi Jiorle
Managing Editor
April is National Poetry Month, so it’s no coincidence that ESU will be holding a poetry event, featuring Traci Brimhall. The event will be held on April 24 in room of 113 of Stroud Hall at 4 p.m. Professor Madigan, advisor of the Calliope, had plenty of nice things to say about Brimhall:
“I have admired Traci Brimhall’s work for awhile, especially her two most recent books. Also, she has published some exceptional new poems this year in The New Yorker. This April, she has a number of readings scheduled at various places in New Jersey, and she was able to also schedule one at ESU,” Madigan said.
Brimhall is a professor at Kansas State University. She received her BA at Florida State University, her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and her PhD at Western Michigan University. She is only 36 years young, so she has been able to do a lot within the creative writing world in a short span of time. Her poetry collections are called “Our Lady of the Ruins” and “Rookery.” She is noted for her unique writing style.
“I like the wildness of her poems and their lyric intensity, the freshness of her voice,” Madigan said.
Madigan mentioned the importance of the Calliope bringing in a well-renowned poet every spring semester.
“I think that bringing in a poet of national reputation every spring is a great thing for the members of Calliope themselves, and also for the ESU community at large. I sometimes see some of my freshman comp students at the event, and one of those students will later tell me that it was the first time he or she had ever attended a poetry reading,” Madigan said.
Brimhall has won the 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry Anthology.
Email Levi at:
lmj7748@live.esu.edu
