Visiting Poet and Founder of the Suffolk University Poetry Center--Fred Marchant--Oct. 25, 2012

Stefi Rubin

Fred Marchant's most recent book of poetry, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009) was named by Barnes & Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. The San Francisco Chronicle picked it as one of the ten best collections of poetry, and the Massachusetts Book Award committee listed as one of the “must reads” of the past year. Janette Currie, writing in Pleiades, has written that “Marchant’s great achievement in The Looking House is to create a new anti-war poetics out of seemingly disparate subjects and images.”

Marchant is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (2000). A new and selected volume, House on Water, House in Air, was published in 2002.  He has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) From a Corner of My Yard, poetry by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa, published in 2006 in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.  Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (2008), a selection that focuses on the work done while Stafford was a conscientious objector during World War II.

Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and The Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston, Marchant is a graduate of Brown University, and later earned a PhD from The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He is a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and was himself a conscientious objector within the military during the Viet Nam War. He has taught workshops at various sites across the country, including The Robert Frost Place (Franconia NH), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA) and the Veterans Writing Group (Sebastopol, CA). In 2009 Marchant was co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.”