Thursday, April 26th
7:00 pm
Art Center Gallery
Please join the English Department in welcoming to campus the 2018 Gates Reader, Bruce Beasley. All are welcome, and admission is free. From Beasley’s website:
Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently All Soul Parts Returned (BOA Editions, September 2017), Theophobia (BOA Editions, 2012). The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems was published by The University of Washington Press, in 2007. His previous collection, Lord Brain, an extended meditation on neuroscience, cosmology, theology, and language, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award and was published in 2005. Beasley won the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 1996 for Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright, and the 1994 Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation. Wesleyan University Press published his books Spirituals (1988) and Signs and Abominations (2000).
He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry. His work also appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize, as well as other anthologies including Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries; Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets; Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951-1977; and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets. His poems appear widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New American Writing, Field, New England Review, and Yale Review.
Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and now lives in Bellingham, Washington. He is a professor of English at Western Washington University and, in 2013, recipient of the university’s Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award. He lives with his wife, poet and nonfiction author Suzanne Paola, and their son Jin.