A suggested reading list will be offered and the writing of a Port Townsend summer journal will be required. New and Selected Poems will be published by Copper Canyon in 2002. His 1995 collection City of Salt was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, he is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Students are urged to submit at least four poems prior to the conference, with the understanding that several of them will be discussed by a workshop focusing on what has been accomplished and what might benefit from further revision.
Poetry is part craft, part quest.
Students are urged to give some thought to what purpose poetry serves in their lives and what matters most to them in poetry, with an eye toward understanding and articulating the quest dimension of their writing. Critiqued Rebecca Seiferle has new poems, Bitters, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in early 2001. Her last collection, The Music We Dance To, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Other poetry collections include The Ripped-Out Seam and a translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce. Poems from The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers' Exchange Award, the National Writers' Union Prize, and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.