Conventions

Photographs of Missouri scenes are reproduced courtesy of Lee Ann Russell, poet from Springfield, Missouri.

ANNUAL STATE CONVENTION

Each year the Missouri State Poetry Society holds a state convention for members and guests. The program for the convention features poets of national and state-wide reputation who read from their work and discuss topics related to the composition of poetry. There are also read-arounds during which each member attending the convention may read his or her poetry to the assembly.

2007 STATE CONVENTION
SEPTEMBER 28-29 IN CRYSTAL CITY. NOTE THAT CRYSTALCITY AND FESTUS ARE TWIN CITIES THAT ARE JOINED TOGETHER.

The meeting place for the convention is Jefferson Memorial Hospital, Industrial Dr., Crystal City, Missouri. Our meetings will be held in Conference room B.

Registration is at 6.00 p.m., Friday, and the first session begins at 7:00 p.m. There is no registration fee. The only convention charge is $6.50 for the Saturday luncheon. Advanced payment is required for the luncheon. Please send checks by September 14 to Billy Adams 12600 McKinstry Road, De Soto, MO 63020. Make checks payable to “On The Edge.”

You are responsible for your own lodging.
There are three motels in the immediate area: Comfort Inn, Tele.636-937-2888. They gave a price, including breakfast, of $69.95 for two people.

The other two motels did not give a reduced rate. They are Drury Inn, Tele.636-933-2400 and Holiday Inn, Tele.636-937-0700.

They are all located neat the intersection of Hwy A and Interstate 55.

Billy Adams of the On the Edge chapter of Missouri State Poetry Society is directing the convention. His USPS address is given above, and his phone numbers are 636-337-0523 (home), and 314-602-1538 (cell). His e-mail address is badams0523@esagelink.com.

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Andrew Hudgins has published five books of poetry with Houghton Mifflin: Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass Hammer (1995), The
Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Stranger (1985). A new collection, Ecstatic in the Poison was published by The Overlook Press/Sewanee Writers’ Series in 2003. He’s also the
author of a collection of literary essays, The Glass Anvil, which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. Saints and Strangers was one of three finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. After the Lost War received the Poets’ Prize in 1989, and TheNever-Ending was one of five finalists for the National Book Award in 1991.
      His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and The Southern Review. His literary and personal essays have appeared in
The American Scholar, The Chicago Review, The Hudson Review, The
Missouri Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, The South
Atlantic Quarterly, The Washington Post Magazine, and other journals.
     Hudgins was a Guggenheim Fellow is 2004, as well as a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University (1983-84) and the Alfred C. Hodder fellow at Princeton University (1989-90), and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1986, 1992) and the Ingram Merrill
Foundation (1987). In 1997, he received both the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the

Ohioiana Poetry Award for lifetime contribution to poetry in Ohio. He was awarded the Hanes Prize for poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1995, and in 1988 he received the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Andrew Hudgins joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 2001 as a professor of English. He is presently Humanities Distinguished Professor in English. Prior to going to Ohio State, Hudgins taught at the
University of Cincinnati from 1985 to 2000, and in 1999 he was named Distinguished Research Professor. In 1996, he served as the Coal Royalty Professor of English at the University of Alabama. In 1999 and 2000 he was a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ropewalk Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Writers’ Conference, and the Indiana Writers’ Conference.
Hudgins received an A.B. in English and history from Huntingdon College in 1969, an M.A. in English from the University of Alabama in 1976, and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1983.

.      Diane Glancy published three books in 2005: Rooms: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publisher, Cambridge, England), In Between Places, essays (University of Arizona Press), and The Dance Partner, Stories of the Ghost Dance (Michigan State University Press). A new collection of poems, Asylum in the Grasslands, was published by University of Arizona in 2007.
       She was awarded a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the 2003 Juniper Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press for Primer of the ObsoleteGlancy’s novels include, Designs of the Night Sky (University of Nebraska Press, Stone Heart: A Story of Sacajawea (Overlook Press), and Pushing the Bear, the 1838-39 Cherokee Trail of Tears (Harcourt Brace).
       Glancy is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she taught Native American Literature and Creative Writing. She is now on a four-year sabbatical / early retirement program. She will be a visiting professor at Kenyon College in the spring semester of 2008 and 2009. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.