Tom Sexton

Tom Sexton: “From East to West to East: One Poet’s Journey” Tom Sexton earned a Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and went on to establish and chair the MFA program at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, teaching there until his retirement in 1994. He was also a founding editor of the Alaska Quarterly Review in 1981. In 1995, the Alaska State Legislature appointed him poet laureate of Alaska. Sexton was a 1958 graduate of Lowell High School and in 2006 was named a member of the Lowell High School Distinguished Alumni. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac, samples of Tom’s poetry are exhibited on signage along the Concord River walkway in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Sexton is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets (University of Alaska Press, 2011), For the Sake of the Light (University of Alaska Press, 2009), and Crows on Black Branches (Chester Creek Press, 2008).

Tom Sexton, Brian Brodeur, & Poetry from Public Colleges
May 12 7:00PM
Celebrate the legacy of poetry from Massachusetts public colleges and universities. Tom Sexton, author of 12 books of poetry, Poet Laureate of Alaska, and a graduate of Salem State University (1968) will read from his work. The event will also feature work by alumni from the Salem Poetry Seminar, a program that provides a free week to write and study poetry for select college students from public institutions in the Commonwealth.

Brian Brodeur, creator of the blog, "How a Poem Happens," is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, The Minnesota Review, and Pleiades. Brian lives with his wife in Fairfax, VA.

This event will be held in the Martin Luther King Jr. Room in the Ellison Campus Center at Salem State University.

Meter Matters: A Reading of Contemporary Metrical Poetry
May 14 12:00PM
A reading by four poets who write primarily, or at least frequently, in rhyme and meter.

Moderated by Bill Coyle.
Meter Matters: A Roundtable Discussion of Contemporary Metrical Poetry
May 14 1:00PM
A roundtable discussion of contemporary metrical poetry. The panel will follow a reading by the four participants.

Moderated by Bill Coyle.