First Friday Poets at VMFA 6-8pm Meet Poet # 4

Poet John Hoppemthaler

TONIGHT!!!   FREE 6-8pm VMFA

Meet Mr. Hoppenthaler:


John Hoppenthaler books of poetry are Lives Of Water (2003) andAnticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), both titles from Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine (forthcoming from U of Michigan P, 2012). His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Laurel Review, Barrow Street, West Branch,Christian Science Monitor, Pleiades, and Blackbird, as well as a number of anthologies, includingPoetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing),Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State U of New York P), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press), Blooming Through the Ashes (RutgersUP), The Sound of Poets Cooking (JACAR Press), and Chance Of A Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions). Among his honors are an Arts Fellowship Award for Excellence in the Field of Literature from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, a North Carolina Community Council for the Arts Regional Artist Project Grant, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Elizabeth Bishop House, and the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. For eleven years, he served as Poetry Editor for Kestrel, and he now edits A Poetry Congeries for the cultural siteConnotation Press: An Online Artifact and curates a guest-edited poetry feature. He also serves as Advisory Board Member forFairleigh Dickinson University’s Words and Music Festival (WAMFEST). Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison for nine years, he is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature atEast Carolina University. He lives on the banks of the PamlicoRiver in Washington,NC with his wife, Christy, his stepson, Danny, and their kitten, Obi.