Please register in advance for this event. A link will be sent closer to the date.

Professor Bathanti will read a handful of his poems and discuss the process of composition and revision, where poems come from, and how to strike the necessary balance between aesthetic distance and intimacy. He’ll also examine issues of maintaining writing habits.

Joseph Bathanti joined the Appalachian State English Department faculty in 2001. He is Professor of English & McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education and Writer-in-Residence of Watauga Residential College, as well as affiliate faculty in Appalachian Studies & The Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies. Bathanti is the former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-2014) and recipient of The Order of the Long Leaf Pine and the 2016 North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program.

He has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Rising Meadow (Poems in collaboration with photographer, Houck Medford), Horse and Buggy Press (Durham, NC), 2021; Light at the Seam (Poems), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2022; The Act of Contrition (Short Stories), Eastover Press (Rochester, MA), forthcoming May 2023; and The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), Blake Hobby, Alessandro Porco, and Joseph Bathanti, eds., forthcoming September 2023