Poet John Hoppenthaler is featured reader at Tusculum College Humanities Series event; Curtis and Billie Owens Literary Award winners to be announced
Poet John Hoppenthaler will read from his work and announce his choices for winners of the 2011 Curtis and Billie Owens Literary Awards on Tuesday, March 22, at 7 p.m. in the Chalmers Conference Center in Niswonger Commons on the Tusculum College campus.
The reading is part of The Humanities Series, sponsored by the Tusculum College English Department. The event is free and open to the public. Arts & Lecture credit is available for Tusculum College students. 
Hoppenthaler has received numerous awards and honors, including an Individual Artist Grant from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, grants from the New York Foundation on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
His books of poetry are “Lives of Water” (2003) and “Anticipate the Coming Reservoir” (2008), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press). His poetry appears in “Ploughshares” “Virginia Quarterly Review,” “McSweeney’s Internet Tendency,” “West Branch,” “Christian Science Monitor” and “Southern Review,” as well as in many other journals and anthologies. He also edits “A Poetry Congeries” for the cultural journal “Connotation Press: An Online Artifact” and curates the “Guest Poetry Editor Feature.”
An assistant professor of creative writing at East Carolina University, Hoppenthaler received his master of fine arts degree in poetry writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.
The Curtis and Billie Owens Literary Awards are annually given to recognize the literary achievements of Tusculum College’s creative writing students. The literary award was named for Curtis Owens, a 1928 graduate of Tusculum College who went on to a teaching career at what is now Pace University in New York. He and his wife established the award at his alma mater to encourage and reward excellence in writing among Tusculum College students.
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