Calendar Alert: Poet Adam Halbur, Aug. 5 at Dartmouth

This summer's Resident Poet at The Frost Place (Robert Frost's home in Franconia, NH, at the time when he finally broke into American publishing), Adam Halbur, gave a great reading at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum this evening, with Ron Padgett taking the other half of the program. What a great evening! Halbur shared new work from his residency, and Padgett provided poems from his spring 2011 collection. With their Midwestern roots, the two poets, young and older, framed language in fresh but very accessible ways.

There's one more chance to hear Halbur read before he returns to Wisconsin. Here's the information from Dartmouth College for the August 5 reading there:

Poetry and Prose
4pm, August 5
Wren Room, Sanborn House

Adam Halbur,  Frost Place Poet in Residence 2010

In July and August, The Frost Place hosts a poet-in-residence who lives and writes in Frost's farmhouse, offering three public readings during the summer. The Trustees of The Frost Place have awarded the 2010 Resident Poet fellowship to Adam Halbur. Adam Halbur was born in 1976 and grew up feeding rabbits, chickens, pigs and steers and milking goats in the rural Midwest. He is the product of German farming immigrants that stretch back five generations from Wisconsin to Nebraska to Iowa and of newer arrivals from Denmark, Lithuania, Bohemia, and French Canada who included a painter, a single mother, a doctor, and probably a carpenter. Much of Halbur's first collection of poems draws on this history as well as on his time as a small-town newspaper reporter.

From the age of thirteen, he went away to school and was largely influenced by friars, monks and nuns, receiving his secondary education at Saint Lawrence Seminary, Wis., and his post-secondary at Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict, Minn. He earned a B.A. in English literature with studies in poetry in 1998 and completed his M.F.A. in 2003 at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, N.C. Though he has held various jobs as a factory worker, park attendant, home insurance audit reviewer and writer and editor, he has taught English as a second language at Japanese and American universities since 2007 to people of various origins, including Japan, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, China, Vietnam, Germany, and Mexico. He is currently an associate lecturer at the ESL Institute at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, but with his wife, son and daughter, continues to split his time between their two home countries of the U.S. and Japan. Halbur published his first book of poems, Poor Manners, in July 2009 in Tokyo with Ahadada Books, the small press of Maryland native and poet Jesse Glass, a professor at Meikai University. His work has also appeared in the anthology Never Before: Poems about First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005) and in magazines such as The Fourth River, Fauquier Poetry Journal, and Dunes Review.

Directions: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gradstdy/visiting/directions.html