Conway poet, teacher and author featured at Wednesday Night Poetry
Erin Hoover, a Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and author of “Barnburner,” 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 will begin at 6:30 p.m. today. Hoover will begin her feature set at 7:15 p.m., followed by another round of open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Born just outside of Harrisburg, Penn, in a small town on the Susquehanna River called Duncannon, Hoover now lives in Conway with her 2-year-old daughter and teaches poetry and nonfiction at Hendrix College.
“For Hendrix’s Murphy Scholars Program, I help plan and present learning opportunities for students in literature and language, including intimate conversations with guest speakers, visits to local, regional, and national cultural institutions, and projects to generate and share student writing,” Hoover said in a news release.
“The poets Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs recently visited, for instance, and a group of students traveled with me to the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October. Since I love reading, writing, and talking about poetry, this is hardly work at all,” she said.
Brown and Jacobs just double-featured at WNP in October, and recommended Hoover as a prospective poet to showcase, the release said. Hoover studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College outside of New York City. She has her master’s degree from University of Oregon and a doctoral degree in English from Florida State University.
“At some point it became important to me not only to practice as a poet, but to write about poetry as an academic and also to help students become poets. This last charge I take extremely seriously. I work with students on their craft but also on finding ways to be poets over the course of their lives, perhaps even to find careers that will support a life in poetry. It feels as though it took me a long time to find how to do that myself,” Hoover said in the release.
In her own right, Hoover is a former editor in chief of “The Southeast Review,” a national literary magazine, and a poet of reputable esteem who started writing about 20 years ago, with a focus on narrative form. The poet Kathryn Nuernberger selected her book, “Barnburner,” for Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award, published in 2018.
“Barnburner” won a Florida Book Award in Poetry, and was named a “favorite poetry book” of the year by the editors of “The Adroit Journal” and by “Largehearted Boy.” When asked about the poems in her book, Hoover said, “I’ve always lived with contrasts. I’ve gained insights from moving between environments of extreme poverty and wealth, from being both despised and prized, as a woman. I’ve tried to act ethically in many instances but also been a coward.
“I’ve labored, then questioned the value of that labor. My narratives are works of artifice, not autobiography, but they are inspired by real life. As a kind of political stance in my work, I believe in writing poetry that reflects the real and imperfect contents of people’s lives,” she said.
Copies of “Barnburner” will be for sale at Wednesday Night Poetry today.
“I am thrilled that Erin is teaching and writing in Arkansas for a time so that we at WNP have a chance to bring a poet with national acclaim into our intimate poetry community of Hot Springs. I love the direction that WNP is going in, rippling outward into the country, and bringing in voices that are meaningful and necessary,” WNP host Kai Coggin said in the release.
This week marks 1,609 consecutive Wednesdays of open mic poetry in downtown Hot Springs since Feb. 1, 1989. Email wednesdaynightpoetry@gmail. com for more information or to be considered as the featured poet.