Poetry Reading by Jim Barnes

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Start: 10/07/2010 6:00 pm

End: 10/07/2010 8:00 pm

Timezone: Etc/GMT-6

Born in Summerfield, LeFlore County, Oklahoma, Jim Barnes is of Choctaw-Welsh descent. In the 1950s, after high school, he migrated to Oregon, where he worked for ten years as a lumberjack. He returned to his home state to take a B. A. at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Later, he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Arkansas. He has taught American and French languages and literatures, as well as world literature in translation, at Truman State University since 1970. In 1978, two years before the publication of his first book, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Since 1980, he has published eight books of poetry, two of poetry in translation, one of criticism analyzing the structure of works by Thomas Mann and Malcolm Lowry, and an autobiography. In 1980 his translation from the German of Dagmar Nick's Summons and Sign won the Translation Prize from The Translation Center (New York). In 1990 he received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio (Italy) Residency Fellowship. In 2003 he enjoyed another Bellagio Fellowship. His 1992 book of poetry, The Sawdust War (Univ. of Illinois Press), won the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry. In 1993-94 he held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Switzerland (University of Lausanne). The City of Munich (Germany) awarded him a two-month Translation Residency at Villa Walberta in 1995 to continue translating poems by the Munich poet Dagmar Nick. From January through May 1996 he held a Camargo Foundation Fellowship to Cassis, France, to continue work on a volume of poetry, Paris (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), and on an autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions (Univ. of Oklahoma Press), which won an American Book Award for 1998. He was awarded a second Camargo Foundation Fellowship for 2001. For three months in 1998 and three months in 2000, he was Guest Writer at Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1998 he published his translation of Dagmar Nick's Numbered Days with New Odyssey Press. His most recent book of poetry is On a Wing of the Sun (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001). His individual poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines in the United States and abroad, including Poetry, The American Scholar, Poetry Wales, The Nation, Kenyon Review, New Letters, and Sewanee Review. He has given over 130 readings of his work in the U.S., France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, The Czech Republic, Japan, and Korea. He is presently Writer-in-Residence and Professor of Comparative Literature at Truman State University, where he also edits The Chariton Review, an international journal of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations.

"Barnes is a masterful poet, a most worthy voice for his generation."-- Samuel Maio

"His poems are a singing in the rain which he knows falls on us all but which, in spite of its chilling touch, also gives life to the earth we must wander over and disappear into." -- Brian Bedard

"It is a deep new pleasure to come on a poet with the imaginative boldness of Jim Barnes." -- James Dickey

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