Professor Named Co-Ohio Poet of the Year

Dr. Stephen Haven, professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University, had his second book of poetry, titled Dust and Bread, named by the Ohio Poetry Association as co-winner for an award for the best book of poems by an Ohio poet published in 2008. Consequently, he was named co-Ohio Poet of the Year for 2009.

“A committee in the Ohio Poetry Association, which consisted of one former Ohio Poet of the Year and other poets and academics, gathered all the books of poetry published by Ohioans last year from the Ohioana Library in Columbus and evaluated them according to a point system,” Haven said. “My book of poems, Dust and Bread, ended up in a virtual tie with Terry Hermsen's The River's Daughter, so Hermsen and I were both named the winner of this year's prize.” Hermsen is a poet on the faculty at Otterbein College.

Haven will attend the awards ceremony on Oct. 17, which will be held in Alliance, Ohio. Past winners of the award include David Baker, faculty member at Denison University and poetry editor of The Kenyon Review; Martha Collins, recently retired faculty member at Oberlin College; Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winner; William Matthews, National Book Critics Circle Award winner; William Heyen, National Book Award Finalist; and Elton Glaser, recently retired faculty member at the University of Akron and author of six collections of poetry.

According to the poetry scholar and critic Harold Bloom, “Dust and Bread is an intensely moving and eloquent book of poems. Much of it centers upon memories of China, much on memories of American childhood. It is a book, not just individual elegies and meditations, and portrays the authentic awakening to self of a poet’s soul through experiential crisis.” According to the poet David Wojahn, runner-up for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, “for all the variety and technical mastery of the collection, Dust and Bread’s most distinctive quality is that hard-won maturity of vision that James Wright famously called ‘the poetry of a grown man.’”

Haven spent more than 10 years writing and editing Dust and Bread, published by Turning Point of Cincinnati. The title of the book comes from a line in the poem, “Summer in a Large House.”

“Dust and Bread” is available through the Ashland University bookstore at 419-289-5336 and via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Bread-Stephen-Haven/dp/1932339027