Charlottesville Words

New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading and book-signing

by Sam Witt

who will present selections from his book of poetry

Sunflower Brother

Saturday, January 10, 2008 at 10:00 AM

Winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition

Sunflower Brother pairs a pastoral setting with images of fire, explosion, irradiation, and burning; both sets of images are equal parts creation and destruction. Witt’s voice always feels fresh from, and flushed with, loss and his elegies — poems written for the dead — not only acknowledge death and limitation buy try to reinvest the mourning self with life. The result can be both beautiful and direct, whether the poet addresses a deceased relative, or speaks more generally to what he percieves as our decaying world. Often it sounds more like Witt’s been reading Keats than anything from his own century.

— Katie Peterson, New Orleans Review 33:1

Sam Witt’s poems are rhapsody and ‘crisp singing’ both. The best are purest poetry — mixing beauty, the reaches of language, and an imagination equally made up of body and grace. He speaks in all our tones. His equivalences are fresh and reveal an involved, likable world.

— Carol Frost (on Witt’s earlier collection, Everlasting Quail)

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Sam Witt was born in Wimbledon, England, but spent most of his time growing up in North Carolina and Virginia. After graduation from the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lived and worked as a free-lance journalist in San Francisco for several years, publishing in such magazines as Computerworld, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Wired. His first book of poetry, Everlasting Quail (UPNE, 2001), won the Katherine Nason Bakeless First Book Prize in 2000, sponsored by Breadloaf. Everlasting Quail was published by UPNE the following year, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and write in Saint Petersburg, Russia for a year. His poems have been published in Virginia Quarterly, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fence, New England Review, among other journals, and in the anthologies The New Young American Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. Witt has taught at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and the University of Missouri Kansas-City, where he is currently serving as the Visiting Assistant Professor in Poetry for the year.

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For additional information, contact Sam Witt at sambrownwitt@gmail.com.