The Ashland University English Department has set the Fall 2011 Reading Series that will include a poetry reading on November 7. Spring readings will take place in April 2012.
The reading will take place in Room 138 of the Dwight Schar College of Education and is free and open to the public. The reading will begin at 4:30 p.m. followed by refreshments at 5:30 p.m.
The reading will take place in Room 138 of the Dwight Schar College of Education and is free and open to the public. The reading will begin at 4:30 p.m. followed by refreshments at 5:30 p.m.
Born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, and later living alone in a trailer during the summers in rural Monroe County, Ohio, Richard Hague has experienced two distinct settings of Appalachian life—polluted mill town and isolated country ridge. The work in his latest book, “Learning How: Stories, Yarns & Tales,” arise from the cultural, economic, and political constructs he encountered there. Hague's latest poetry book is “Public Hearings,” poems social, satirical, and political. In some of his previous books he has written about physics, cosmology, and the development of the atomic bomb (“The Time It Takes Light”), urban gardening (“Garden”), the town/country split of his Appalachian upbringing (“Ripening, Mill and Smoke Marrow”), Appalachian landscape and culture (“Possible Debris”), creativity (“Burst: Poems Quickly and Lives of the Poem: Community & Connection in a Writing Life”), the presence of the past on the Ohio River (“A Week of Nights Down River”), and growing up, physically and culturally, in two places: (“Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life”), which was nominated for a National Book Award. His latest poetry manuscript is “During The Recent Extinctions: New and Selected Poems,” forthcoming from Dos Madres Press. It deals with the effects of human culture on the earth's flora and fauna, as well as on the spirit of humans themselves. He teaches young people at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati, where he has worked continuously since 1969, leads adult creativity and criticism workshops, and occasionally teaches courses in intertextual reading and in teaching poetry writing at The Institute for Professional Development and Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston. He has also taught at the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, at Edgecliff College, and at Xavier University. He is the winner of the Black Swamp Poetry Prize, the l982 Post-Corbett Award in Literary Arts in Cincinnati, two President’s Awards from The Ohio State University, three Individual Artist Fellowships in two genres from the Ohio Arts Council, the James Still Award in Short Fiction, the 2004 Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association for “Alive in Hard Country,” and was named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year in 1985 for “Ripening” by the Ohio Poetry Day Association. His writing has appeared in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Teachers & Writers, Ohio Journal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Birmingham Poetry Review, Margie, Smartish Pace, Appalachian Journal, Now & Then, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, and many others. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife, professor and potter Pam Korte, is father to two grown sons, Patrick and Brendan, and is proprietor of a small commercial organic enterprise, Erie Gardens.
