Prize-winning poet from Conway featured at WNP
Sandy Longhorn, a prize-winning poet, author and professor from Conway, will be featured at Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee + Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic session for all poets, musicians, and storytellers will begin at 6:30 p.m. today. Longhorn will begin her feature set at 7:30 p.m., followed by another round of open mic. “Admission is free and open to all ages. All are welcome. WNP is a safe space,” a news release said.
“I was born and raised in northeast Iowa and have lived in central Arkansas for nearly 20 years. Grad school brought me to Arkansas; teaching allowed me to stay,” Longhorn said in the release.
“I am an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, where I coordinate the undergraduate creative writing programs. When I’m not teaching, I’m reading and writing my own work, as well as creating paper collage hybrid pieces,” she said.
Longhorn received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Longhorn received the $5,000 Porter Fund Literary Prize in 2016 and is the author of three books of poetry: “The Alchemy of My Mortal Form,” “The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths,” and “Blood Almanac.” Her poems have appeared in The Indianapolis Review, North American Review, and Oxford American.
“’Blood Almanac,’ which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, is largely based on my MFA thesis from the University of Arkansas. It contains poems about coming of age in the agricultural upper Midwest. The poems explore both family and the land,” she said.
“’The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths’ was inspired by both the Grimm Fairy Tales in their original forms (not the Disney-fied versions) and the idea of saints and reliquaries. In this book, I imagined what fairy tales and saints would have arisen in the rural Midwest if we didn’t have Grimm or the traditional Christian religious figures. These are cautionary tales especially interested in gender and the importance of weather to an agricultural community,” she said.
“’The Alchemy of My Mortal Form,’ which won the Louise Bogan Award, is a departure from my place-based writing of the first two books. This is a collection of persona poems focused on one character, the sickly speaker. The speaker suffers from a fever of unknown origin and the book tells her story of institutionalization and hospitalization.”
Longhorn will have some copies of her books at Wednesday Night Poetry.
“I started writing in grade school for class assignments. I loved rhythm and rhyme, and my first poem was about having to get glasses at a young age. When I reached college, I had professors who opened my eyes to the diversity of contemporary American poetry and I began to write in free verse. I am a daughter of the confessional poets of the 1960s and 70s. Over time, my inspiration has grown to include the environment and the relationship of people to their environments, whether urban, suburban, rural, or wild,” Longhorn said.
“I first came to poetry as a reader. What I found in poetry was a way to celebrate the beauty of the world but also a way to make sense of, or try to, the atrocities humans will commit against humans and the natural world. If I can’t make sense of it, poetry offers some comfort in not being alone. Poets that inspire me: Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, Danez Smith, Lucie Brock-Broido, Ama Codjoe, and too many more to list,” she said.
“Currently, I’m working on a new project, ‘52 Parks: 52 Poems,’” Longhorn said. “I am visiting each of Arkansas’ 52 state parks and writing a poem from each of those visits. So far, I’ve visited 32 parks and have about a dozen drafts in pretty good shape with many more in the nascent stages. Having lived in Arkansas for longer than I ever lived in Iowa, I realized that I had not focused on my relationship to the land I now call home. Given the fact that the parks are spread around all of the regions of the state, I’ve been on quite the educational journey. In fact, while in the pursuit of poetry, I fell off Mount Nebo and ended up with stitches in my forehead and my left knee. I can now say that I’ve bled for my art!”
This will be Longhorn’s second time to feature at WNP. Her first time was in 2019. When asked about her connection to Wednesday Night Poetry, Longhorn said, “WNP is a treasure that reminds me poetry lives and thrives despite what the headlines about its demise try to tell us. I found WNP because of the amazing Kai Coggin.”
“It is a joy for me to welcome Sandy Longhorn back to feature at Wednesday Night Poetry,” said host and Hot Springs Poet Laureate Kai Coggin. “I recently went up to UCA to be interviewed by some students for the Arkansas Story Vault project, and Sandy had kindly offered her conference room for our space. Sandy does so much to uplift voices and bring contemporary poets to the young people studying under her in the MFA program. We got to talking about our passions, and nerding out a little bit about nature, and she told me about her current project visiting and writing from Arkansas’ 52 state parks. I am so excited to hear poems from this collection in progress and to share Sandy’s beautiful poems of place with the WNP community.”
This week marks 1,841 consecutive Wednesdays of open mic poetry in downtown Hot Springs since Feb. 1, 1989 — over 35 years ago. “Wednesday Night Poetry is the longest-running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country. For more information, email wednesdaynightpoetry@gmail.com,” the release said.