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Poets Jeanie Thompson and Kathleen Driskell at Athens State University

Poets Jeanie Thompson and Kathleen Driskell will be reading from and talking about their latest collections of poetry at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009, at Athens State University library in Athens, Alabama. This event will kick off Thompson's and Driskell’s North Alabama literary tour that will also include speaking engagements in Huntsville and Florence. The event at Athens State, sponsored by the Friends of the ASU Library, will be free and open to the public. A reception will follow the reading.

I have known Jeanie Thompson for over twenty years. She first came to the Athens State campus as a participant in the Annual Writers' Conference in 1988 shortly after her first book of poetry was published (How To Enter the River, 1985), and she was a guest at future conferences.. Tuesday will be Driskell's first visit to the ASU campus.

Thompson's latest book of poetry is The Seasons Bear Us. The epigraph to her newest book comes from poet James Wright: . . writing of any kind, as long as it is done for its own sake, is a matter of joining the seasons and following their movements. . . . They move, as we move, from place to place. As we move, we carry them, and they carry
us . . . the seasons bear us. – James Wright, in a letter to Laura Lee

Here is what the publisher of the book, River City Publishing, has to say about The Seasons Bear Us:

"From wandering the rivers and valleys of her upbringing to veering off the beaten paths in Italy, for her fourth collection of poems, award-winning poet Jeanie Thompson carries the meditations of her heart across the span of a year.  Returning to familiar subjects—love, motherhood, her elegiac Southern landscape, and the continuing search for a deeper connection “running with” her blood— Thompson’s poems bear lessons grounded in her favorite earth, rich with her most important people, and full of grace. Following the late James Wright’s counsel that writing is like the seasons, and 'the seasons bear us,' Thompson refocuses her lens on the longings of the human heart. Masterfully crafted, poem after poem searches out the reader, each moment rich in its own season, bearing the good fruits of honesty and grace from a brilliant poet and a life well lived."

Jeanie Thompson has published three collections of poetry in addition to The Seasons Bear Us: How To Enter the River, Witness (which won the Benjamin Franklin Award of the Publisher’ Marketing Association), and White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems. Her poems have appeared widely in such magazines as Black Warrior Review, Crazy Horse, Louisville Review, New England Review, North American Review, River Styx, and Southern Review. She has received individual artist fellowships from the Louisiana Council on the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, has held a Walter Daken Fellowship at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and in 2002 was named Alumni Artist of the Year by the University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences. She also co-edited a collection of memoirs by Alabama Writers called The Remembered Gate and Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, a collaboration with photographer Wayne Sides. Thompson has directed the Alabama Writers’ Forum since its inception in 1993 and is a faculty member of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.

Award-winning poet and teacher Kathleen Driskell will read from her recently published volume of poetry entitled Seed Across Snow. Driskell serves as Associate Program Director of Spalding University's brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky. In addition to her most recent book Seed Across Snow (Red Hen Press, 2009), she is the author of one previous full-length book of poems, Laughing Sickness (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 1999, 2005) which is in its second printing (2005). She also has published High Horse: Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University (co-edited with Sena Jeter Naslund) and Place Gives Rise to Spirit: Writers on Louisville, an anthology she edited as a fundraising project for the Kentucky Writers' Coalition. The KWC is a non-profit statewide writers' organization she helped to found in 1996. Kathleen has published poems or has work forthcoming nationally in literary magazines such as The Southern Review, The American Voice, New Millennium Writings, The Connecticut Review, GulfStream, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Greensboro Review, and Mid-American Review. In 2005, she received two Pushcart Prize nominations from PoemMemoirStory. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she was poetry co-editor of The Greensboro Review (with Claudia Emerson).

Kathleen also serves as the Associate Editor of The Louisville Review and has taught creative writing and literature at Spalding University, the University of Louisville, Elon College, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, as well as many writers' workshops and conferences. Kathleen lives with her husband and two children in an old country church built before The American Civil War.

Click here to read a sample of Thompson's and Driskell's poetry on Swampland.

---Penne J. Laubenthal

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