 |
David Mason | |
|---|---|
 David Mason Outdoors in 2012, taken by Christine Mason | |
| Born | December 11, 1954 (age 68) Bellingham, Washington, U.S. |
| Occupation |
|
| Nationality | American |
David Mason (born December 11, 1954) is an American writer and the former Poet Laureate of Colorado.
David Mason was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. [1] He studied briefly at the Colorado College, but left after one year to work as a fisherman in Alaska. He returned to the college to earn his B.A. in 1978. Mason and then-wife, Jonna Heinrich, [2] moved to Rochester, New York, where he worked as a gardener. In 1980 they went to Greece, where they lived for just over a year in Kardamyli, Greece, in the Mani district of southernmost part of the Peloponnesus. While living there he became a friend of the British travel author and war hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mason returned to the United States when he was hired to write the screenplay for a film based on a novel he had written. In the end the film was canceled when the production company closed its film division.
After a part-time teaching stint at Colorado College, he began studying at the University of Rochester under Anthony Hecht. His first marriage ended, and in 1988 he married Scottish photojournalist Anne Lennox. He received his doctorate from The University of Rochester [3] and moved to Moorhead, Minnesota, where he taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead for ten years. In 1994, Mason was named the Minnesota Outstanding Professor of the Year. [4] Mason spent the academic year of 1996–97 in Greece on a Fulbright fellowship, where he continued to perfect his Greek, meet Greek intellectuals and writers, translate and write, and visit old places from 16 years earlier. In 1998, Mason returned to his alma mater, Colorado College, where he now co-directs the Creative Writing program. In 2010 Mason was named Colorado Poet Laureate, [5] for a four-year term ending in the summer of 2014. He and wife Anne Lennox [2] lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado until the marriage ended in 2012. Currently he lives in Manitou Springs, Colorado with his wife, Australian poet Cally Conan-Davies. [6] The post of Colorado Poet Laureate comes with a small stipend and an expectation of ten public appearances in the state each of the four years in the term, but Mason chose to greatly expand on those expectations, attempting to visit all 64 counties of the state during his term in order to share poetry in public appearances. [7]
David Mason's collections of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize) and The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award). He is coeditor of four major anthologies and has authored dozens of poems, essays, reviews, translations, stories and memoirs. An advisory editor at the Hudson Review, the Sewanee Review and Divide, Mason's work can be found in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.
A collection of his work "Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004–2014" was published in 2014 by Red Hen Press.
David Mason is especially noted for his historical novel in verse, Ludlow, about the Ludlow Massacre in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Mason's personal connections to the event include a great-grandfather, George Mason, settled in Huerfano County in the late 19th century and ran, in Mason's words, "one of the notorious 'company stores' that cheated the miners near Ludlow." [7] An additional connection to a different part of Colorado is that Mason's maternal grandfather, a coal miner turned physician, is remembered in Grand Junction as the "last of the horse-and-buggy-doctors." [7] Mason adapted Ludlow into an opera in partnership with composer, Lori Laitman, which was scheduled to run at Opera Colorado in 2014, [6] but was cut when the company's schedule was reduced for economic reasons.
Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to poetry.
William James Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Bruce Meyer is a Canadian poet, broadcaster, and educator—among other roles in the Canadian literary scene. He has authored more than 64 books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism. He is a professor of Writing and Communications at Georgian College in Barrie and Visiting Associate at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he has taught Poetry, Non-Fiction, and Comparative Literature.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Walter E. Butts was an American poet and the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. His book Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café was a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry from the California State University, Fresno, and won the Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize. He has also received a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Jared Carter is an American poet and editor.
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
'The Rhapsodic Fallacy' is an essay by United States poet Mary Kinzie in which she defines and attacks a "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. It was first published in Salmagundi of Fall 1984 and was collected in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and a somewhat shorter version of the essay was later anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics The essay was one of several of the mid-1980s that sparked a heated discussion over the role of form in American poetry, and was thus implicated in the formation of the New Formalism movement.
John Wayne Harold "Jack" Foley is an American poet and radio personality, living in Oakland, California.
John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska.
Michael Salcman is an American poet and physician who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His poetical work is infused and vivified by his medical profession, his love of and expertise in contemporary art, and by the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors. His work is characterized by a lushness of diction, a strong moral focus, and a sense of playful imagery.
Lawson Fusao Inada is a Japanese American poet. He was the fifth poet laureate of the state of Oregon.
Timothy Iver Murphy was an American poet and businessman. Reviewing Timothy Murphy's second collection in Contemporary Poetry Review in 2002, Paul Lake observed that "What Virgil was to the Italian peninsula and Homer to the Greek Mediterranean, Murphy is to the swatch of plains stretching from the Upper Midwest to the Rockies like a grassy inland sea."
Amit Majmudar is an American novelist and poet. In 2015, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Ohio.
Sydney Lea is an American poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. He was the founding editor of the New England Review and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. Lea's writings focus the outdoors, woods, and rural life New England and "the mysteries and teachings of the natural world."
William Trowbridge is an American academic and poet who was a Poet Laureate in the American state of Missouri.
Radcliffe Squires was an American poet, writer, critic, and academic. He published several well-regarded books of poetry, as well as biographical and critical works which focused on highly acclaimed 20th-century writers.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
