Berry College Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing Sandra Meek will launch her new book with a reading and signing April 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the college chapel.
“An Ecology of Elsewhere,” was named a Spring 2016 Poetry Top Pick by Library Journal. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, the book interweaves a difficult past, personal and terrestrial, with an uncertain future. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1,500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise.
The book will be on sale at the reading and will become widely available May 3. The event is free and open to the public.
Meek is the author of four other books of poems, “Road Scatter”, “Biogeography” (winner of the Dorset Prize,) “Burn” and “Nomadic Foundations.” She also edited an anthology, “Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad” which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Her poems have appeared in Best of the Net 2015, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review, among others.
A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Meek has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for “Burn,” and in 2003 for “Nomadic Foundations,” which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991. She is a co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit and poetry editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum. Learn more about her books at www.sandrameek.com.
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Written by Student Public Relations Assistant Victoria Mashburn.
