Texas poet John Poch guest of James Hoggard Reading Series

Texas Tech creative writing professor coming to WFMA Nov. 14

Texas poet John Poch guest of James Hoggard Reading Series

The James Hoggard Reading Series at Midwestern State University, in conjunction with the Speakers & Issues Series, will present poet John Poch at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 14, at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU Texas.

Part of Poch’s reading will be from Texases, his fifth collection of poems. In Texases, Poch looks at the geography and people, past and present, of his home state with a mix of prose, formal poems, and free verse. Texases was published in May by WordFarm Press.

Poch is a professor of creative writing at Texas Tech, where he has taught since 2001. Poch collaborated with photographer and fellow Texas Tech professor Jerod Foster for Between Two Rivers: Photographs and Poems Between the Brazos and the Rio Grande, published by Texas Tech University Press, also released in May.

He is a Fulbright Core Scholar, and the 2007 Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College. His other collections of poetry include Poems (2004), a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil Prize; Two Men Fighting with a Knife (2008), winner of the Donald Justice Award; Dolls (2009); and Fix Quiet (2015), winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

The series is named for James Hoggard, who retired in 2013 as the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English after teaching at MSU since 1966.

This event is free and open to the public. It is supported by the Bryan L. Lawrence Endowment, the Libra Foundation, MSU’s Prothro-Yeager College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Wichita Falls Times Record News, KCCU-FM NPR Radio, and KFDX-TV3. For more information, email Dr. John Schulze.