From an ARTCORE press release:
Wyoming’s Poet Laureate David Romtvedt contacted ARTCORE in Casper because he enjoys the organization’s summer format of "Music & Poetry." The University of Wyoming MFA program is bringing two Canadian writers to the state, and their Casper appearance will be sponsored by ARTCORE, the Casper College Literary Advisory Committee, and the UW MFA program on Sunday, October 10, 2010, at 4 p.m. in Durham Hall of the Aley Fine Arts Center of Casper College. Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst will read their poetry, and Romtvedt, well known as a solo performer and as a member of Fireants, will provide the music at this free event. For information, call 307-265-1564.
Jan Zwicky's books of poetry include Wittgenstein Elegies (Brick Books, 1986), The New Room (Coach House Press, 1989), Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (Brick, 1998) which won the Governor General's Award in 1999, Robinson's Crossing (Brick, 2004) which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press, 2005). Her books of philosophy include Lyric Philosophy (UTP, 1992; second edition, Gaspereau, forthcoming), Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau, 2003, 2nd ed, 2008), and Plato as Artist, due out from Gaspereau in the fall of 2009. Her unusual approach to prose philosophical discussion presents design challenges, and Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press has twice won awards for his work with her books. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian, and she publishes widely as an essayist on issues in music, poetry, philosophy, and the environment. She is also a violinist, with a strong interest in baroque performance practice. Since 1986, she has edited poetry for Brick Books. A native of Alberta, she now lives on the west coast of British Columbia.
Robert Bringhurst was born in Los Angeles in 1946 and raised largely in Montana and Alberta. His father, however, was born near Garland, Wyoming. As a boy, Bringhurst spent many summers with his grandmother in Lovell. He has published nearly twenty books of poetry over nearly four decades, from The Shipwright's Log (1972) to the recent Selected Poems, issued by Gaspereau Press in 2009. Design schools and publishers throughout the Western Hemisphere rely on his book The Elements of Typographic Style (3rd ed., 2004), which has now been translated into ten languages.
In 1999, Bringhurst published a groundbreaking study of a Native American oral literature, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999). Two volumes of translation followed: Nine Visits to the Mythworld (nine mythtexts dictated by the Haida poet Ghandl) and Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. In 2004, this trilogy won the prestigious Edward Sapir Prize, awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and was chosen as Literary Editor's Book of the Year by the Times of London. "Bringhurst's achievement," wrote Margaret Atwood, "is gigantic, as well as heroic. It's one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head." Bringhurst has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, writer-in-residence at the universities of Edinburgh, Winnipeg, and Western Ontario, and Philips Fund Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Bringhurst and Zwicky will hold a joint residency for several weeks during Fall 2010.
David Romtvedt was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Southern Arizona. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he also studied at the University of Texas where he held a graduate fellowship in folklore and ethnomusicology. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaire (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He teaches in the MFA program for writers at the University of Wyoming and serves as the state's poet laureate. His books include: Moon; Free and Compulsory for All; How Many Horses; Windmill: Essays from Four Mile Ranch; A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know; Crossing Wyoming; and Some Church. He is the recipient of the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, a Wyoming Arts Council Literature fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry series award, and two NEA fellowships in poetry and music. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming with his wife, the potter Margo Brown.
