November Laureate Series: Joyce Sutphen

Tuesday | November 5 | 7:00pm
Blue Heron Coffeehouse

Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s Poet Laureate, will present her work as part of the Laureate Writers Series. She will read from her new book Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems. The book is introduced by Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate. The reading will be followed by a short Q&A, a book signing, and an open mic.

Joyce Sutphen holds a PhD in Renaissance Drama from the University of Minnesota and is a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, in St. Peter MN. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View (1995), won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize. Her second, Coming Back to the Body (2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third, Naming the Stars (2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In 2005, Red Dragonfly Press published a fine press edition of Fourteen Sonnets. Red Dragonfly also published First Words (2010), After Words (2013), and Modern Love & Other Myths (2015). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Water~Stone, Hayden’s Ferry, Shenandoah, Luna and many other journals and anthologies.

Joyce Sutphen’s evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the late 1960s, and traveling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota and beyond will recognize themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbors in these poems, which move us from delight in keen description toward something like wisdom or solace in the things of this world.

In addition to poems selected from the last twenty-five years, Carrying Water to the Field includes more than forty new poems on the themes of luck, hard work, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language and lyrical precision.

This event is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Blue Heron Coffeehouse and the City of Winona.

The City of Winona is a partner of the River Arts Alliance.