Poetry with John Lane and David Romtvedt: Southern Range and Still on Earth

Join us at Hub City Bookshop on April 10 from 6-7 PM for an evening of poetry with Spartanburg writer John Lane and former Wyoming poet laureate David Romtvedt.

Get a 10% discount on the books the when you RSVP on Eventbrite and present it at the register.

Southern Range gathers John Lane's long poems into a volume spanning over four decades. Since the early 80s, Lane's imagination has often taken the form of long poems, or sequences of poems. By choosing to write to longer impulses, Lane has explored formal traditions practiced by many of the poets he most admires. Sometimes meditative, often layered, associative, and playful, Southern Range borrows images and explores memories from landscapes Lane knows well, mostly the upper Piedmont of South Carolina.

With Still on Earth, David Romtvedt addresses the sometimes disconcerting, sometimes thrilling, and, if we accept the writer’s premise, always wacky crossings experienced by figures identified as the person, the poet, and the angel. All three intersect and collide with the society and culture within which they exist, prompting speculation that uncertainty could be preferable to knowing. Romtvedt’s delightfully plainspoken and immediate poems probe the mysterious purpose of our stay on earth with humor, candor, and grace.

John Lane is Emeritus Professor of environmental studies at Wofford College and was founding director of the college’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He has won the Louisville Review Prize and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award. His Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems won the SIBA (Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Poetry Book of the Year prize in 2012. In 2017 his nonfiction book Coyote Settles the South was one of four finalists for the John Burroughs Medal and was named by the Burroughs Society one of the year’s “Nature Books of Uncommon Merit." In 2014 he was inducted into the SC Academy of Authors. He, with his wife Betsy Teter, is one of the co-founders of Spartanburg’s Hub City Writers Project.

A graduate of Reed College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, David Romtvedt served with the Peace Corps and Maison du Québec in Rwanda and with a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua. He is a professor emeritus in the MFA program for writers at the University of Wyoming and was the state's poet laureate from 2003 to 2011. With the band the Fireants, he performs dance music of the Americas and with Ospa, traditional and new Basque music. His most recent books are Still on Earth, a poetry collection, and Forest of Ash, translations of the earliest written Basque song and poetry. Earlier books include No Way: An American Tao Te Ching and Gernikako arbola / The Tree of Gernika, translations of the nineteenth century Basque poet and troubadour Joxe Mari Iparragirre. He has also published the novel Zelestina Urza in Outer Space. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Arts Council, his work has won the Pushcart Prize, and the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award. His book A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know was a National Poetry Series selection. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Hub City Bookshop & Press, 186 West Main Street, Spartanburg, United States