The USD English Department is pleased to announce that a poem by one its faculty members has been selected for the Best American Poetry anthology for 2004.  The poem, by Visiting Writer Craig Arnold, will be published in the prestigious series in the fall.

The series, which has been running since 1988, has been named “one of the best things going in modern American literature” by Library Journal, and “a year’s worth of the very best” by People.  Each year’s edition is guest-edited by a different major American poet.  Past editors have included Robert Bly, Mark Strand and Adrienne Rich; this year the task fell to award-winning poet and translator Lyn Hejinian.

Arnold’s poem, “Your friend’s arriving on the bus,” will be his second appearance in the series – another poem, “Hot,” was published in Best American Poetry 1998.  His first book of poetry, Shells, was awarded the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1999.  Arnold has also garnered national attention for his involvement with Poetry Slam, a grassroots movement of poets who perform or ‘slam’ their work in bars and cafes, competing for scores awarded by judges who are randomly selected from the audience.

Arnold will lead a workshop on performance poetry next Thursday, 2/19, at 2 PM, as part of the Vermillion Literary Project’s (VLP) Poetry Festival.  Later that evening, he will host the VLP Poetry Slam at the Coffee Shop Gallery, 24 West Main St, in downtown Vermillion.  On Friday 2/20 at 1 PM, he will give a reading of his work at the English Department’s John R. Milton Writers Conference.

For more information, consult the Milton Writers Conference website:

http://www.usd.edu/engl/conference.html

and the VLP Poetry Festival website:
http://www.usd.edu/~projlit/poetryfestival.html

posted by Michelle Rogge Gannon at 6:04 PM