Tom Sexton (poet)

Last updated

Tom Sexton (born 1940) is an Alaskan poet and scholar who became the state's Poet Laureate in 1995 [1]

Contents

Childhood and education

Sexton grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. After graduating from Lowell High School in 1958, he spent three years in the Army two of them stationed in Alaska. He then worked odd jobs, before enrolling in Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where he helped found the college's literary magazine Parnassus, a multi-award winning publication still in print today.

He went on to enter Salem State College, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in English. He then went to the University of Alaska, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree and was hired to help establish the English Department at the newly opened Anchorage Campus.

Career

From 1970 to 1994, Sexton taught English and creative writing at the University of Alaska – Anchorage where he established the creative writing program and served as English Department chair for several years. He was a founding editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review , leaving the magazine when he retired in 1994. He was appointed Alaska's Poet Laureate in 1995, having been selected by the Alaska State Council on the Arts (AKSCA) and confirmed by the Alaskan legislature. [1]

Sexton is the author of ten books of poetry. His A Clock With No Hands [2] is a collection of poems about growing up in Lowell. His most recent book is For the Sake of the Light, [3] which includes "Alaska Spring," a poem that was set to music by American composer Libby Larsen and premiered April 21, 2012 for the 25th anniversary of the Alaska Chamber Singers. [4]

Personal life

Sexton and his wife, Sharyn, spend every other winter in Eastport, Maine.

Notes

  1. 1 2 Library of Congress.
  2. Sexton, Tom. A Clock With No Hands. Adastra (2007)
  3. Sexton, Tom. For the Sake of the Light. University of Alaska Press (2009_
  4. Webb, Megan. "Anton Armstrong conducts premiere of Libby Larsen piece with Alaska Chamber Singers." ChoralNet, May 30, 2012. http://www.choralnet.org/318440 (accessed July 25, 2013).


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iowa Writers' Workshop</span> MFA degree granting program

The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing. It has been cited as the best graduate writing program in the nation, counting among its alumni 17 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The music of Alaska is a broad artistic field incorporating many cultures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Al Young</span> American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter (1939–2021)

Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miller Williams</span> American poet, translator, editor

Stanley Miller Williams was an American contemporary poet, as well as a translator and editor. He produced over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments were chronicled in Arkansas Biography. He is perhaps best known for reading a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of his best-known poems is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina."

Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Dauenhauer</span> American poet, linguist, and translator

Richard Dauenhauer was an American poet, linguist, and translator who married into, and subsequently became an expert on, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. He was married to the Tlingit poet and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer. With his wife and Lydia T. Black, he won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804

John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Collier (poet)</span> American writer and academic

Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.

Linda McCarriston and holding dual citizenship of Ireland and the United States, is a poet and Professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Alaska Anchorage, teaching creative writing and literary arts since 1994.

Mark Wunderlich, is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA degree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julie Kane</span> American poet

Julie Kane is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor and was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Fox Chandonnet</span> American poet

Ann Fox Chandonnet, born Ann Alicia Fox, is an American poet, journalist, book reviewer, and culinary historian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernestine Hayes</span> American writer (born 1945)

Ernestine Saankaláxt Hayes belongs to the Kaagwaaataan clan, also known as the wolf house, representing the Eagle side of the Tlingit Nation. Hayes is a Tlingit author and an Emerita retired professor at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) in Juneau, Alaska. As an author, Hayes is a (Tlingit) memoirist, essayist, and poet. She was selected as the Alaska State Writer Laureate in 2016 and served in that position until 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Elliott Myers</span> American poet and educator (1941–2009)

Jack Elliott Myers, was an American poet and educator. He was Texas Poet Laureate in 2003, and served on the faculty of Southern Methodist University in Dallas for more than 30 years. He was director of creative writing at SMU from 2001 through 2009. Myers co-founded The Writer's Garret, a nonprofit literary center in Dallas, with his wife, Thea Temple. He published numerous books of and about poetry, and served as a mentor for aspiring writers at SMU and as part of the writers' community and mentoring project of The Writer's Garret.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edmund Skellings</span> American poet

Edmund Skellings was an American poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Florida from 1980 to 2012, and was succeeded by Peter Meinke.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beth Ann Fennelly</span> American poet and writer

Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature of New England</span>

The literature of New England has had an enduring influence on American literature in general, with themes such as religion, race, the individual versus society, social repression, and nature, emblematic of the larger concerns of American letters.

Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.

Jerah Chadwick was the Alaska Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Most of his writing centers around the time he spent in Alaska in an abandoned World War II facility with his partner, Mike Rasmussen.