Wednesday Night Poetry to feature Little Rock native
Jon Tribble will be this week’s feature for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic session for all poets begins at 6:30 p.m. and Tribble will perform at 7 p.m., followed by another open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
A native of Little Rock, Tribble lives in Carbondale, Ill., where he works at Southern Illinois University and is the managing editor for the prestigious literary journal Crab Orchard Review. In 2001, he won the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College, was the 2003 recipient of the Artist Fellowship Award in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council and was the winner of the 2016 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize.
Tribble has had three collections of his poems published. The most recent, “God of the Kitchen,” was released this year by Glass Lyre Press. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Ploughshares, Poetry and Crazyhorse.
He first started writing in the eighth grade when he penned a series of Civil War poems. It wasn’t until he was a student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that he began writing poems to share and publish. “It was after I read Maura Stanton’s ‘Snow on Snow’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘The Dolphin.’ I was intrigued by the lyrical possibilities in the work,” Tribble said. “Over the years my poetry has become more narrative and engaged in the world around me, both personal and public.”
Tribble grew up in a church camp devoted to medical and social services programming on the outskirts of Little Rock. He has worked as a dishwasher, maintenance worker, fry cook, movie theater manager, data processing clerk, and night watchman. Topics of his poetry include family history, work experiences and stories other people tell him.
His favorite poets include Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop and Ralph Burns.
Tribble is married to poet Allison Joseph who has a book soon to be released by Little Rock publisher Sibling Rivalry Press.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.