Private Workshop with Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven [photo by Celia Olsen]

Stephen Haven, award-winning poet and director of a university poetry press and MFA Program, will offer a private poetry workshop from his Shaker Heights home on eight Sunday evenings, 7:00-9:00 p.m., May 10-June 28. Interested writers must be accepted into the workshop by submitting a 10-page poetry manuscript by April 15 to shhaven@gmail.com.  The cost of the workshop is $600, paid by May 1. Enrollment is limited to 10 poets.  Email Stephen Haven for more details. 

Stephen Haven at Ohio Poetry Day

Stephen Haven of Ashland University was named the Ohio Poet of the Year (see my previous post)* for his newest poetry collection Dust and Bread, and, as part of the Ohio Poetry Day celebration, gave a reading at Mount Union College on October 18.

Haven's reading featured work from the prize-winning collection, and also some more recent work, poems about being a single father, poems about China, poems about growing up as the kid of a preacher in the Mohawk Valley (including a sestina about being snowbound with a bishop, which I found quite a tour de force). His reading was alive with alliteration and clever internal slant-rhyme.

The Ohio Poetry Day event included a lot more than just the reading by the poet of the year. Following the reading and signing by Haven, the winning poems from the Ohio Poetry Day contests were read.

Some of the other poetry activities were poetry workshops and games-- including three overnight poem-writing contests** where the challenge was given 10 pm on Friday night and the poems turned in 10 am Saturday morning, the Evan Lodge workshop (with the interesting feature that the writers of the poems participated... anonymously. The authors of each poem were unnamed.) And an amusing poetry riddle game, "stinky pinky," from the Alliance poetry group (examples: A small flying insect? Wee bee. Wet canine? Soggy doggy. Tilted sepulcher? A tipped crypt. Beginnning of a lawsuit? Initiation of litigation.)

• find Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven at Mac's Backs, along with other books by Steven Haven.

(The pictures in a slightly larger size can be viewed in my album. I'm sorry that I only have four decent shots of the event-- I was inadequately prepared, and my camera ran out of battery right in the middle of the reading!)

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*one of two Ohio Poets of the Year in 2009. Although it's unusual for the award to be split, this year Terry Hermsen and Stephen Haven share the honors of Ohio Poet of the Year.

**Two of which I won. Yes! Too bad that the art of writing poems fast is not necessarily the same as the art of writing good poems.

Ohio Poet(s) of the Year

On Ohio Poetry Day, Terry Hermsen and Stephen Haven will be named the (co) Ohio Poet of the Year*.

Congrats to them both!

Stephen Haven will be reading at the Ohio Poetry Day celebration at Mount Union College in Alliance, on October 17.

Stephen Haven, a professor at Ashland University, was chosen for his book Dust and Bread. (For a review, and some sample poems, look here). He is also the author of one earlier collection of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, and of a memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk**.

Terry Hermsen, on the other hand, won't be at the Ohio Poetry day celebration-- but he's got a good excuse: he is currently doing a poetry residence in Chile! Hermsen was chosen for his book The River's Daughter, from Bottom Dog Press. Hermsen lives in Delaware, and teaches at Otterbein College. He is the author of several previous books of, and about, poetry.

• find Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven at Mac's Backs (along with other books by Steven Haven)
• find The River's Daughter by Terry Hermsen from Bottom Dog Press, or at your local independent bookseller
  

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* This is the fifth time in the last 30 years that the poet of the year award is split between two Ohio poets.
**A review of The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk, from Contrary Magaine, can be found here.