• By Candace Brennan
  • Posted Thursday, May 17, 2012

UNCSA Professor & Poet Joseph Mills is Coming to Central

Join us for a special afternoon with award-winning poet Joseph Mills.

In more than four dozen poems, Joseph Mills explores what it means to engage books so intensely that distinctions between people and characters blur. According to Mills, we live our lives on and in stories. From fairy tales to Shakespeare to Westerns, stories shape how we act, think, and see the world. This makes libraries dangerous places where you can be irrevocably altered, and the workings of heaven itself may be affected by changes in publishing technology.

Mills’s work has been featured several times on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor and in hundreds of forums including former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s “Life in American Poetry.”

Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities, at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He also is the poet-in-residence at Salem College. His other Press 53 poetry collections are Love and Other Collisions (2010); Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers (2008), and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle (2006).

In addition to his poetry, Mills co-authored, with his wife Danielle Tarmey, A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries, for John F. Blair, Publisher, and he has edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers.

An Afternoon with Joseph Mills
Thursday, May 24th
12:30 pm
Central Library Auditorium

For more information, please call 703-3022 or email Candace Brennan.

PRAISE FOR Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet

“Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet by Joe Mills is one of the most original collections of poetry I have ever encountered—original because it treats the whole world of books, poems, stories, fairy tales not only as being somehow more real than reality itself but as our most important lifelines to reality itself. In Mills’s created world of Huck and Hamlet and Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and the Seven Dwarves, we laugh with each surprise, each ironic insight, each portrait of a world that is funnier, whackier, and more completely alive than our world. There is about this book a sense of everything happening for the first time, even those literary events that seem to happen over and over. What a pleasure this book gives the reader.”
— Anthony Abbot, award-winning author of If Words Could Save Us and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat.

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