Michael Hettich
The 2023-2024 UCA Visiting Poet Series will conclude on April 16 with a public reading by North Carolina poet Michael Hettich at 7 p.m. in the McCastlain Art Lecture Hall on the UCA campus. The series is jointly sponsored by the School of Language and Literature (SLL) and Slant, the school’s international journal of contemporary poetry.
A resident of Black Mountain, North Carolina, Hettich is the inaugural recipient of the Hudson-Fowler Prize in Poetry, awarded by SLL and Slant in the spring of 2023. Among his other awards are three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize, The David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize, The Swan Scythe Prize, The Tales Prize, the Lena M. Shull Book Award and the Yellowjacket Press Prize for Florida Poets.
Hettich’s poems first began appearing in Slant in 1992. Over a 34-year career, he has published more than a dozen book-length collections and an equal number of poetry chapbooks. His most recent book, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, was published in May 2023 by Press 53.
His work has appeared in such other journals as Orion, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness and The Literary Review. His writing has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Visiting Bob: 100 Poems for Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018) and Rewilding: Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press, 2020).
The reading is open to the public and is free of charge. For more information, contact Slant editor Michael Blanchard at mblanchard@uca.edu.