The WVU Humanities Center is excited
to host poet John Hoppenthaler on Monday, October 23, at 7:30 PM in the Milano
Reading Room, Downtown Library. He will début his fourth collection of poetry, “Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area,”
published this month from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
“We are
excited to host John as he launches this new, wonderous collection,” Humanities
Center Director Renée Nicholson said. “John’s work, both on the page and in the
world of arts and letters always bears the highest mark of quality. He finds
the beauty within the image, focusing on what is worth saving in a world that,
perhaps, does not rise to all it could be.”
For nine
years, Hoppenthaler served as personal assistant to the acclaimed American
writer Toni Morrison. For 12 years, he served as poetry editor for the West
Virginia-based literary journal Kestrel:
A Journal of Literature and Arts. He also edited “A Poetry Congeries”
for the cultural journal Connotation
Press: An Online Artifact.
Hoppenthaler’s
many honors and achievements include an Individual Artist Grant from the West
Virginia Commission on the Arts, Regional Artist Project Grants from the North
Carolina Community Council for the Arts and Residency Fellowships to the
MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Elizabeth
Bishop House, Dairy Hollow Writer’s Colony and the Weymouth Center. A Professor
of creative writing at East Carolina University, his book “Domestic Garden” won
the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in
2015.