BRYAN WALPERT | "Poetry has always seemed to me the most fun you can have with language. It means, refuses to mean, tickles your brain, inhabits your body. What’s not to like?" |
Bryan Walpert is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. The author of four books, his work has also appeared widely in journals and anthologies in New Zealand and the United States.
In 2007, he won the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition; the James Wright Poetry Prize (U.S.) from the Mid-American Review; and the inaugural Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing-Fiction. Recently, his work was selected as a finalist from 6,000 entries in the 2011 (U.S.) Rattle Poetry Prize and as a semi-finalist in a field of 3,000 entries from 59 countries in the 2011 Montreal Poetry Competition.
His first collection of poetry, Etymology, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2009. The same year he published a collection of short stories, Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press), which was named a Best Book of 2010 in New Zealand. His second collection of poetry, A History of Glass (2011), was a finalist in the Stephen F. Austin State University Press national poetry book contest and made the (U.S.) Poetry Foundation’s contemporary poetry bestseller list in April 2012. He has also published a scholarly book, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2011).
Originally from the U.S., Bryan received a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Maryland-College Park and a PhD in English from the University of Denver. He moved to Palmerston North in 2004 and is a senior lecturer in the School of English & Media Studies at Massey University, where he teaches creative writing.
Bryan has received both the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award. He was instrumental in establishing the Writers Read series, a partnership between the School of English & Media Studies and the Palmerston North City Library that draws the best of New Zealand writing to Palmerston North.
www.bryanwalpert.com
"Palmerston North is filled with poets and the poetry obsessed, fiction writers and fiction fanatics. Obsessed with language, image and story, they turn up again and again in the rain to hear writers present their work or to read their own. There is such a hunger for literature here you’d nearly think we were doing something important."
