WILSON, N.C. – October 17, 2016 — Barton College will welcome author and poet Peter Makuck for the upcoming Victor R. Small Writers Series Lecture on Monday. Oct. 24. The lecture is scheduled for 7 p.m. in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on campus. This event is free and open to the public, and all are invited to attend.
Twice winner of the annual Brockman-Campbell Award for best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian (1988, 2011), Peter Makuck has authored five volumes of poetry; the last is “Long Lens: New & Selected Poems” (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010). Forthcoming in October 2016 from the same publisher is “Mandatory Evacuation.” Also forthcoming this fall is his fourth collection of short stories, “Wins and Losses,” from Syracuse University Press.
His essays and reviews, poems, and stories have appeared in “The Hudson Review,” “Poetry,” “The Nation,” “North American Review,” “Southern Poetry Review,” “The Georgia Review,” “The Virginia Quarterly Review,” and “The Sewanee Review.” Founder and editor of “Tar River Poetry” from 1978 to 2006, Peter Makuck is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University.
Makuck grew up in New London, Conn. He took courses at l’Université Laval in Quebec and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Francis College in Maine, where he studied French and English. After a two-year stint of teaching French, he returned to graduate school and completed a Ph.D. in American literature from Kent State University. In 1974-75, Makuck was a Fulbright Exchange Professor at Université de Savoie, in Chambéry, France. And, in 1990-1991, he was Visiting Writer at Brigham Young University. Makuck now makes his home with his wife, Phyllis, on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.
His collection of short stories, “Costly Habits,” released by University of Missouri Press in October 2002, was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award. The University of Illinois Press published “Breaking and Entering,” an earlier collection. He has five times received honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. One of his stories, “Filling The Igloo,” was included in The Best of the Southern Review. “The Trouble With Smitty,” a personal essay on guns, was listed in The Best Essays of 2000. His “Trapping in Foreign Country” won the Monroe Spears Award, given for the best essay to appear in The Sewanee Review in 2010.
The other half of Makuck’s writing life has been devoted to poetry. “Where We Live” (1982), “The Sunken Lightship” (1990), “Against Distance” (1998), and “Off-Season in the Promised Land” (2005) were published by BOA Editions Ltd. “Pilgrims” (Ampersand Press) won the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 1989. “Shorelines,” a chapbook, was published in May 1995 by GreenTower Press. More recently, in 2009, Independent Press released another chapbook, “Back Roads.” Released in 2010 by BOA Editions, Ltd., “Long Lens: New & Selected Poems” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The Victor R. Small Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English and Modern Languages in the School of Humanities at Barton College. For additional information, please contact Dr. Jim Clark, dean of the School of Humanities and Elizabeth H. Jordan Endowed Chair for Southern Literature, at (252) 399-6450 or jclark@barton.edu.
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