Events

Alex Grant's Chains & Mirrors won the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (Best Collection by a North Carolina poet) and the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. Fear of Moving Water, his 2009 full-length collection, was a finalist for a number of national book contests and runner-up for the 2010 Brockman Campbell award (Best North Carolina Poetry Collection) and the 2010 Oscar Arnold Young Award. The Circus Poems will be released by Lorimer Press in October 2010. A Pushcart nominee, he has received the Kakalak Poetry Prize and The Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, and his poems have appeared in many national journals, including The Missouri Review, Best New Poets 2007, Arts & Letters, The Connecticut Review and Verse Daily. He lives in Chapel Hill NC, with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess. He can be found on the web at www.redroom.com/author/alex-grant. Dorianne Laux is author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, Superman:The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet's Companion:  A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. In 2001, she was invited by late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress. She has been teaching poetry in private and public venues since 1990 and since 2004 at Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.  In the summers she teaches at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Her poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Dutch, Afrikkans and Brazilian Portuguese and her selected works, In a Room with a Rag in my Hand, have been translated into Arabic by Camel/Kalima Press.  Recent poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and The Valparaiso Review. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men,will be published by W.W. Norton in February, 2011.  She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press.  His first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, DoubleTake, New Letters, Ploughshares, Manoa, and River Styx. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, Montalvo Center for the Arts, Oregon Literary Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize in Poetry.  In 1997 he gave up his job as a telephone installation foreman to teach.  He now lives in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program in Oregon and yearly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, and each poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.” He has a new chapbook from Red Dragonfly Press called Bestiary, and his third collection of poems, Blue Rust, will be published in fall of 2011 by Carnegie Mellon Press.