Poets Christopher Davis And Allison Hutchcraft Bring Lives and Nature to the Page in “Oath” and “Swale”
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In this episode 162, we meet award-winning Charlotte poets Christopher Davis and Allison Hutchcraft, authors of the poetry books, “Oath,” published by Main Street Rag and “Swale,” published by New Issues Press with Western Michigan University. Chris and Allison both teach at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
David Trinidad says “there is a sharp, steel-like edge to the lines in Christopher Davis’s poems-so finely wrought are they, and attuned to ‘the brutality of fact,’ the limits of human interaction.”
Paisley Rekdal says “Hutchcraft examines the delicate balance between rapture and ravishment, in poems as ambitious as they are beautiful.”
We start the show with Chris reading his poem “Examine Her Life” and Allison reading her poem “I have written myself into a Tropical Glow.”
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About Christopher Davis:
Christopher Davis is the author of four books of poetry: The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, winner of the 1988 Associated Writing Programs award, The Patriot, published by University of Georgia Press in 1998, A History of the Only War, published by Four Way Books in 2005, and Oath, published by Main Street Rag Press in 2020. He holds a BA from Syracuse University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is a professor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
When Chris was 18, his younger brother, Ben, who was 15, was murdered. In the aftermath, his parents divorced, and his mother became active in an organization called Parents of Murdered Children. His mother died in 2000. The first poem in my new book, Oath, is about her life.
More about Chris here in Storied Charlotte
About Allison Hutchcraft
Allison Hutchcraft grew up in California and received her MFA from Purdue University. She is the author of the poetry collection Swale, which was named the 2019 Editor’s Choice by New Issues Poetry & Prose and is forthcoming in October of 2020. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals. Her co-translations of contemporary Spanish poet Concha García’s poems have appeared in West Branch and The Massachusetts Review. A former resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast, she has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, a Regional Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Science Council for the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, and scholarships from the Tin House Writers Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
Allison’s creative work is deeply informed by landscapes and the natural world, as well as historical and environmental lenses. Her poetry collection Swale includes a ten-poem sequence on the extinct dodo bird as well as a poem imagining one of the last Steller’s sea cows. Many poems in her collection were also inspired by the three and a half months she spent in 2018 as a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, perched where north-central Oregon’s Salmon River Estuary meets the sea. Some animals she has been lucky to see while an artist-in-residence: elk, river otters, harbor seals (memorably popping up around her kayak while out on the estuary), a California sea lion, more birds than she can count, and (twice in the rural mountains of northern Georgia) bears.
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