Today@Sam Article

Debut Texas Review Press Poet To Host Reading

Oct. 22, 2019
SHSU Media Contact: Scott Kaukonen

The Sam Houston State University MFA program in creative writing, editing, and publishing, in conjunction with the Texas Review Press, welcomes poet Jennifer Sperry Steinorth to campus for a reading and book signing at 5 p.m, Wednesday, October 30, in Austin Hall. Steinorth’s debut collection of poetry, “A Wake with Nine Shades,” is among the highlights of TRP’s fall catalog.

“We’re thrilled to be able to collaborate in this fashion with the Texas Review Press,” said Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program. “Our students have long worked with the press as interns and graduate assistants, and with the new leadership team in place, led by Lisa Tremaine and J. Bruce Fuller, we look forward to the opportunity to bring a range of diverse and insightful new voices to campus as well.”

While she is on campus, Steinorth will also meet with Haven Gomez’s undergraduate poetry class and with Fuller’s undergraduate practicum in publishing class.

“We want our students face-to-face with the visiting writers,” Kaukonen said. “It’s an opportunity for them, both the undergraduate and the graduate students, to see and hear from a range of perspectives regarding the art and craft of being a writer, but also about the ways in which writers make a life.”

In addition to being a poet, Steinorth is an educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Warren Wilson College where she received her MFA in poetry.

“Although there is word-play in the title of this book and throughout its alternating brief and densely fragmented poems, the play is dark,” poet Maurice Manning said. “This is a book that communicates by impression, more than expression. The impression I get is that of a dance between love and grief. The partners are locked together, bound by a locked language, a shared contrast that cannot be refused. This personal dance is also set against our dark national dance of recent and older history. Yet it’s all happening at once in a timeless blur. And there’s a present audience, who is inclined to see this dance as bitter and beautiful and unavoidable in the same glimpse.”

Manning adds, “This is real and immediate poetry, presented on the page in the moment of its passionate breath. That breath belongs to the world, but it is also starkly human. Though death is a central feature of this book, the poetry is about being alive.”

The Texas Review Press, housed at Sam Houston State University, is committed to publishing quality fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and scholarship. It was founded in 1979 by the late Paul Ruffin, and currently publishes between twelve and sixteen books a year. To learn more about the press, you can visit its website: texasreviewpress.org.

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