Poetry Month Events in The Honors College

The Honors College celebrated Poetry Month with readings by poets Dan Rifenburgh and Bradford Gray Telford (April 14) and August Kleinzahler (April 20).

April 20 - August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler read from his recent collection Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, followed by a reception.
Sponsored by The Honors College, The Center for Creative Work, the Martha Gano Houstoun Foundation, and the English department.

April 14 - Bradford Gray Telford

Dan Rifenburgh’s first book, Advent, published by Waywiser Press of London, received the 2002 Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL). Born in New York, he received his M.A. from the University of Florida, where he studied with Donald Justice, and later attended the University of Houston. His work has appeared in The New Criterion, Paris Review, The New Republic, Southwest Review, and elsewhere, and has garnered the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the TIL. He was recently a participating writer, workshop teacher, and editorial panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts Operation Homecoming initiative, a writing program geared toward young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. (Dan served three years in the US Army as a military journalist during the Vietnam War). He lives with his family in Houston, where he works as an 18-wheeler truck driver.

Bradford Gray Telford is the author of the poetry collection Perfect Hurt (Waywiser, 2009) and the translator of Geneviève Huttin’s The Story of My Voice (forthcoming from Host, 2010). His poems, translation, and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Yale Review, Bomb, Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Lyric, and many other journals. He is a Houston Writing Fellow at The University of Houston.  

August Kleinzahler published his first book of poems, A Calendar of Airs, in 1978. Since then he has published seven others including The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), which won the 2004 Griffin International Poetry Prize and the 2004 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. His current collection of poetry is Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), for which he was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose, Cutty One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (FSG, 2004) and a book of his collected music journalism Music I – LXXIV (Pressed Wafter 2009). His essays and criticism appear regularly in the London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Threepenny Review.