CANCELED
March 10, 2020 (Jackson, Miss.) - Belhaven's Creative Writing Departmentwill host poet Adam Vines for a reading of his published works on Monday, March 16 at 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. in the Student Center Theatre. Part of the department's Visiting Writer Series, this event is free and open to the public. Vines will be answering questions as well as speaking with students on a variety of topics about the art of writing and poetry.
Vines graduated with his bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He then receivedhis MFA from the University of Florida in 2006, where he also taught and earned the Excellence in Teaching Award from the University Writing Program in 2005. He is now an assistant professor at UAB, where he teaches poetry writing workshops and earnedthe Core Teaching Award from the UAB English Department in 2008.
He has published work in Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Poetry, and many others. He was named the Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2008 Sewanee Writers' Conference. At UAB, Vines is on faculty atthe annual Ada Long Creative Writers' Workshop for high school students. Also for UAB, he has beenthe editor of Birmingham Poetry Review since 2011.
In 2012, Vines was among the featured debut poets in Poets and Writers, and was granted the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts the following year. His collection of poetry entitled The Coal Life was nominated for The Poet's Prize in 2014. He also published a collaborative collection of poetry with Allen Jih entitled According to Discretion. Most recently, Vines was awarded the William Alexander II & Lisa Percy Fellowship at the Rivendell Writers' Colony in Sewanee for a residency in spring 2017.
Vines' current project is a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by his love of visual art. These poems center onthe fascinating interactions between people and the art they observe at museums. Some of these have recentlybeen published in 32 Poems,Gulf Coast, andThe Southwest Review, among others. The Poetry Foundation features two of his poems - “Lures” and “River Politics.”