POETRY READING EVENT
Poetry & Prose Reading
with Cathryn Hankla
from her new book
Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New & Selected Poems with musical interludes and some poetry reading as well by Grant Kittrell
Saturday, September 13th
4-6PM
FREE, but this is a limited seating event and you must register online! This event will be limited to a group of approximately 25 people.
Cathryn Hankla's RETURN TO A CERTAIN REGION OF CONSCIOUSNESS gathers recent poems with those culled from eleven previous volumes to reveal a mature poet and her journey through more than four decades of subjects, places, selves, and the challenging art of poetry. From moon shots to pandemic ambiguities, like a color wheel of approaches to poetry's mystery and meaning, this book's prose poems, strict syllabics, metrics, and nonce forms of the poet's making pull into a coherent whole, unified not by consistency but by the poet’s perceptive imagination. A painter who began as a photographer and filmmaker, Hankla is at home in long poems or haiku, employing close observation, associative collaging, and spinning stories into talismans. This collection samples projects such as GALAXIES and LAST EXPOSURES: A SEQUENCE, as well as volumes of prose poems published twenty years apart and the several books between, telescoping backward to Hankla's earliest works, AFTERIMAGES, praised by William Stafford, and PHENOMENA, her prizewinning launch from University of Missouri Press. The poet's preoccupations include travels, history, domestic life, childhood, family tragedy, love relationships, art, and environmental and personal losses, while the complicated cultural backdrop of Appalachia together with its topography, flora, and fauna forms a through line, a fault line, and a heartline. Hankla remains a steadfast witness and guardian of the region that has shaped her. As Henry Taylor wrote, Hankla's poems drift from a recognizable world "through something like a beaded curtain" to evoke "several of the other worlds that are in this one."
Born in the Appalachian mountain town of Richlands, Virginia, Cathryn Hankla is professor emerita of English & creative writing, Hollins University, where she spent most of her academic career. She directed the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, twice chaired the English & Creative Writing Department, and has served as Poetry Editor of The Hollins Critic (1996-2023). She was appointed Jackson Professor of Creative Writing 2012-2014.
Hankla has published sixteen books in multiple genres, including IMMORTAL STUFF (prose poems), NOT XANADU (poetry), LOST PLACES: On Losing and Finding Home (a memoir in essays), GALAXIES (poetry), GREAT BEAR (poetry), FORTUNE TELLER MIRACLE FISH (stories), and A BLUE MOON IN POORWATER (novel). Her poetry ranges through forms, received and invented, including prose poems. Her writing has been awarded the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, a Virginia Commission for the Arts grant in poetry, and artist's fellowships here and abroad to Malta, Spain, and France.
Her poetry is anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, IX: Virginia, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, World English Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Shenandoah: 20 Years of Poetry, and Mississippi Review Anthology, among others. Hankla's poems, stories, and essays appear regularly in journals such as New World Writing, Arts & Letters, Jubilat, Appalachian Heritage, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, and Alaska Quarterly.
Hankla exhibits artwork at Market Gallery, Roanoke, and enjoys run/walking along the Roanoke River Greenway.
Grant Kittrell
Grant Kittrell is a writer, visual artist, musician, and amateur naturalist. He recently served as a judge for ASLE’s Environmental Creative Writing Book Award, and his own work has appeared in The Common, Terrain.org, The Carolina Quarterly, Gigantic Sequins, and Split Rock Review, among other publications, and in his collection of prose poems, Let's Sit Down, Figure This Out(Groundhog Poetry Press). His writing was also recently included in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press). He currently works at Randolph College where he serves as the Director of Academic Services and the Writing Program and as an English Instructor. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his partner Hannah and their pups, Margot and Hap.
