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 Jason
Sommer holds degrees from Brandeis, Stanford (where he held
the Mirrielees Fellowship in Poetry), and St. Louis University
and has taught there, and at University College, Dublin.
He has published three poetry collections: Lifting the
Stone, Other People's Troubles, and The
Man Who Sleeps in My Office. Most recently, he translated,
along with Hongling Zhang, three novellas by Wang Xiabobo
(widely recognized as one of the most
important figures of 20th-century Chinese letters) to be
published by the State University of New York Press. He has
also published verse in The New Republic, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly,
and other magazines, and in several anthologies, including The
New American Poets. His work has been honored with a
National Endowment for the Humanities grant and, in 2001,
with the coveted Whiting Foundation Writers' Award. Since
1985 he has served as Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence
at Fontbonne University. |
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"It isn’t the beauties
of being 'on the mountain,' as they say here, that have
brought me back to Sewanee over the years, though there
are beauties aplenty in the natural setting. It’s
the internal landscapes that my students manage to bring
into words, which remain the lure for me. Again and again,
I get to be in at the breakthrough. Frequently, they
express wonder at how much can happen in their writing
in such a short time, and I’m surprised, also,
at how often the impact of two weeks can rival, in effect
for them and satisfaction for me, some of the best graduate
and undergraduate workshops I’ve taught. Maybe
the gains that these young writers make here are because
they are such a select crew in the first place, lively-minded,
seriously playful, and vice versa, and poised on that
tipping point near the start of things where the right
small change opens quickly onto greater ones. Beyond
the workshops and readings, they certainly have to feel—as
I do—buoyed by the staff of able writers surrounding
them, always ready to talk writing. Maybe it is the
mountain, after all, that makes it easier to learn or
re-learn that one way to render our insides is first
to train our view outward. The lightly-traveled road,
only the slightest interruption in the greenery; the
overlook that shows the wind taking its visible body
from oak, hickory, poplar, and pine; the pyrotechnics
of sun and falling water; all of it might well have something
to do with what happens here."
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