Longtime Professor Returns To Ripon College For Poetry Reading
15 March 2020 News
RIPON — David Graham, who taught English at Ripon College for 29 years, will return Wednesday, March 25, for a poetry reading of his recent work. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the MLK Lounge, Harwood Memorial Union. It will be free and open to the public.
The visit is sponsored by the Ripon College Visiting Writers Series and the Schang Family Visiting Writer Fund.
At Ripon, Graham served as chair of the English department, writing coordinator, faculty advisor to Parallax and director of the Visiting Writers Series, among other duties. He also served on the advisory board for Verse Wisconsin; Poets’ Prize selection committee; board of directors of the Thrasher Opera House; and Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission.
He has published poems, essays and reviews in a wide variety of anthologies and journals, both in print and online; and given numerous presentations and readings in many states.
He has seven published collections of poetry and two anthologies. His two most recent books both appeared in summer 2019. The Honey of Earth includes poems on a wide variety of themes, including aging, family relations, love, art, small-town life and the complications of memory. Most of them were written in Ripon.
The cover features a painting, “Piseco Kitchen,” by his wife, Lee Shippey, depicting Graham’s family’s camp in the Adirondacks. The book is available on amazon.com.
The anthology Local News: Poetry About Small Towns, for which he is a co-editor, includes work by poets from across the country.
Graham has been poetry editor for Blue Moon Review and poet-in-residence at the Frost Place, in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he also taught workshops. Currently, he is a contributing editor for the online journal Verse-Virtual with his regular column “Poetic License,” on poetry and poets.
After retiring from Ripon in 2016 as professor of English and the Helen Swift Neilson Professor of Cultural Studies, the Grahams moved back to their native upstate New York.
More information is available on his website at www.davidgrahampoet.com.
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