After Reading

by Bill Brown

Overview

During the pandemic, Bill Brown started reading friends' poems that he loved. He chose a quote from each poem and wrote a tribute poem as a response. That is how this book, After Reading, got its title. Brown selected poems from 33 poets, most of whom he knows and loves as friends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604542691
Publisher:	Iris Press
Publication date:	03/15/2023
Pages:	86
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Bill Brown is the author of twelve poetry collections and a writing textbook, Important Words, on which he collaborated with Malcolm Glass. In 1999 Brown wrote and co-produced the Instructional Television Series, Student Centered Learning, for Nashville Public Television. Brown directed the writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville for 19 years. His philosophy that those who write live more examined lives fostered a love of words in generations of students. He retired from Hume-Fogg in May 2003 and accepted a part-time lecturer's position at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In 1995 the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts named him Distinguished Teacher in the Arts. He has been a Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a two-time recipient of Individual Artist Fellowships in poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. In 2011 the Tennessee Writers Alliance awarded Brown Writer of the Year. He continues to do consultant work and lead writing workshops.

Editorial Reviews

In this wise and generous collection, poet Bill Brown shows us the power of a poetic community. "Peopled" with towhees, otters and "late red throated hummingbirds" encountered during pandemic social distancing, but peopled too with the remarkable poets and poems who sustain the author, as he now sustains us, his readers, with this "gift... carried with prayer, // sometimes joy, and often / in blue heron dreams."

-Pauletta Hansel, Weatherford Award Winner, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Heartbreak Tree

If poems could talk with each other, Bill Brown's After Reading might be what they'd speak. And who's to say they don't converse? For that's what poems and poets do, build community, share coffee, dream up new ways to love and old ways to reconcile love's loss. Read and converse.

-Jim Minick, author of Without Warning

There is so much gifted in this book. It is a feast of giving, receiving, gifting on. It is, indeed, a kind of communal breathing, a chronicle of inspiration. I love the energies crackling-the tender, rigorous presence, the attunement to place, particulars, stillness, being-between the original poems' titles/lines and Bill Brown's wise and felt, celebratory responses to them. After Reading is both a Bill Brown collection and a kind of anthology, personal and communal; most of all, it's a love letter to friends, to reading, to life.

-Thorpe Moeckel, author of Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw and According to Sand

From the Publisher