Local poet Thom Ward will read from his work for the Hyam Plutzik Memorial Poetry Series at the University of Rochester at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 1, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the River Campus. The event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served.
Ward's debut collection of poems, Small Boat with Oars of Different Size, was published this year by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, a collection of sequential poems about a husband, wife and their child in utero, was the winner of the 1998 Devil's Millhopper Poetry Contest. It will be published next year by the Devil's Millhopper Press at the University of South Carolina.
Ward has received a fellowship from The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts for his new poetry collection underway, Among the Scattered Farms: Fifty Poems for Brigham-Smith.
The recipient of three grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Ward has been published in anthologies, newspapers, and journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Yankee, and Christian Science Monitor. Six of his poems were nominated for the 1996 Pushcart Prize.
Ward is editor/development director for BOA Editions, Ltd., an independent not-for-profit poetry publishing house, and teaches writing workshops at Roberts Wesleyan College and through Writers & Books. He serves on the literature panel of The New York State Council on the Arts for 1999-2000.
The Plutzik Series, one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary reading programs, was established in 1962 to honor the work of Hyam Plutzik, a distinguished poet and Deane Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at the University.