Wisconsin Poet Laureate Reading
2013-14 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Max Garland, will read a selection of his poetry. The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, who selected Garland as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, praised his poetry for its richness of language, human understanding, and accessibility to broad audiences. As Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate, Garland hopes to “reach out to those who may feel alienated from the world of poetry (or art), and yet have deeply felt experiences to record and honor…. [P]oetry is still a means of expression open to everyone. It’s one of those things that’s just too important to be left to experts.” In particular, Garland is “interested in promoting the connection between poetry and place, and urging young, as well as young-at-heart writers, to write of the places they know and explore their relationships with those places in poetry.”
Max Garland
Max Garland is the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2013-2014. A first generation college student, Garland left a ten-year career as a mail carrier to pursue his love of poetry. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1989 and has been teaching since 1990; currently he is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In his first poetry collection, The Postal Confessions, which earned the prestigious Juniper Prize for Poetry, Garland chronicles his years carrying the mail in a classic American voice. Garland’s second book, Hunger Wide as Heaven, earned another national prize, this time from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a leading force in the publishing and promotion of new American poetry.