James Tillotson Whitehead, 1936-2003

The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation: Arkansas Festival of Writers

Link: The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation: Arkansas Festival of Writers.

The 2008 Arkansas Festival of Writers will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation with readings by Susan Perabo, Leon Stokesbury, and other alumni. The festival will be held April 9 & 10 on the UA campus in Fayetteville. Information on travel and lodging is available at the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce. A full schedule of events is below.

Wednesday, April 9
* 5:30 pm, Giffels Auditorium - Reading by Susan Perabo and Leon Stokesbury
* 7 pm, Garden Room on Dickson Street - Formal dinner and reception

Thursday, April 10
* 5 pm, Giffels Auditorium - Screening of "Fighting Mad," featuring Peter Fonda, James Whitehead, Bill Harrison, and Miller Williams
* 7 pm, Giffels Auditorium - 40th Anniversary Celebration and Reading
* 9 pm - Reception, hosted by Bill and Merlee Harrison

Guests

Susan Perabo is the writer in residence and associate professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She is the author of a collection of stories, "Who I Was Supposed to Be" (Simon&Schuster, 1999), which was named a Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch, and a novel, "The Broken Places" (Simon&Schuster, 2001). Recently her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and Creative Non-Fiction. Two of her new stories were shortlisted in this year's "Best American Short Stories." She is currently finishing a second collection of short fiction.

Leon Stokesbury received his MA and MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1972, and his PhD from Florida State University in 1984. He has taught creative writing at several colleges and universities, including serving as visiting poet-in-residence at North Texas University, Hollins College, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. For the past 20 years he has taught in the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Stokesbury's first book, Often in Different Landscapes, was selected as a co-winner of the first annual Associated Writing Programs Poetry Competition in 1975. His collection Autumn Rhythm: New and Selected Poems, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1996, was awarded The Poets' Prize as the best book of poems published by an American for that year. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Partisan Review, the New Yorker, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the New England Review, and numerous other journals. Stokesbury was selected as the first recipient of The Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, has been awarded the Robert Frost Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and is a recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry.

                  

Call for participants: AWP conference memorial for Jim

Posted on behalf of Michael Downs

I'd like to let visitors to this site know a bit more about the panel planned for the upcoming AWP conference that's noted here on this site. Last summer, after Jim died and after his memorial service, Susan Perabo and I talked about the need to make sure AWP acknowledged Jim's death at its upcoming conference. Jim was one of the founders of AWP, and we thought the organization needed to remember him. AWP's conference organizers agreed, and though we had missed the deadline for panel proposals by more than a month, they welcomed the addition of this panel honoring Jim.

To help draw people to the panel, I sent out the following paragraphs as an e-mail to as many writers as I could. If you'd like, please forward them to anyone you know who may attend AWP and be interested in attending the panel.

Jim Whitehead was a poet and novelist and former offensive lineman at Vanderbilt. He also was one of the founders of the creative writing program at Arkansas and of AWP. He taught fiction (to Barry Hannah and Ellen Gilchrist) and poetry (to Leon Stokesbury, R.S. Gwynn, C.D. Wright and others). He loved the sonnet, and Yeats, and Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin. He was a giant, with voracious intellectual tastes that ranged from Biblical scholarship to Amazonian culture and SEC football. He once went on tour with Tom T. Hall.

His novel, JOINER, was a New York Times notable book of the year, and his volumes of poetry were published by the University of Missouri Press and the University of Illinois Press.

Which is all a kind of bloodless way of saying that I loved him, as did so many of his students. His death was sudden and hurt us deeply. This panel is an effort to pay him tribute.

The panel is titled "A Local Man Exits: A tribute to James Whitehead." If you go to the AWP site (http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/) and see "A Local Man Exists," well, that's an unfortunate typo they've yet to fix.

I hope I see some of you there (and if any of you guys are looking for a room at the Palmer House, I've got one with two beds and two bathrooms I'm willing to share -- $60 a night).

Best,

Michael Downs

P.S. Here's one of Jim's poems that's a particular favorite of mine.

A LOCAL MAN ESTIMATES WHAT HE DID FOR HIS BROTHER WHO BECAME A POET AND WHAT HIS BROTHER DID FOR HIM

I shot the chicken in the tree above
Where Herbert stood howling after I'd shot.
Bitterly he cried so loud of feather Love
Itself became involved. Lord, lord, the fit
He threw was terrible. He said his head -
His sacred head - was daubed for poetry -
He said my cruelty would make him mad -
He said it was a ritual catastrophe.

Herbert was splattered with old chicken blood
And pink feathers from eyes to knees. He said
Later, twelve years later, that he was sad
He'd frightened me. Within a month he died.
On his deathbed he reached out for my hand
And he said we come from where we get the wound.

AWP 2004 Conference Schedule

March 24 - 27, 2004
Chicago, Illinois

FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2004
2:30-4:00PM
Parlor A

A Local Man Exits: An appreciation of James Whitehead

An appreciation of James Whitehead. Michael Downs, Beth Ann Fennelly, R.S. Gwynn, Leon Stokesbury, William Harrison, Margaret McMullan, Steve Yarbrough. He was a lineman at Vanderbilt, and a poet whose sonnets sometimes growl with a Mississippi voice. His novel "Joiner" won acclaim as a New York Times Noteworthy Book of the Year. He was a co-founder of the Graduate Programs in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, and he served as president of AWP and as one of its founding lights. James Whitehead died last summer at age 67. Students, colleagues, and friends will gather to read and discuss his work, and talk about his legacy.