It Could Have Been Music

Posted byKendall DunkelbergPosted inWritingTags:,

As I turn from grading exams and essays back to getting ready for this year’s Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium, coming up in less than two weeks, I am thinking about this year’s theme. It could have been a musical theme, at least judging by our poets.

Shirlette Ammons’ book includes an extended play CD with music from her group Mosadi, which has played with bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Known as a stellar performer, Shirlette is bound to give a great reading on Friday morning.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas has dedicated his first book of poems to the legacy of soul legend Donny Hathaway. His book Colling Board is formatted like an old LP record with two sides and alternate takes of poems that retell events of Hathaway’s life from different perspectives.

Sean Hill also uses musical call and response in his rendition of life in the twentieth century African American community in Milledgeville, Georgia. And Beth Ann Fennelly has been influenced by blues and rock and roll, according to a critic writing for Booklist.

Published by Kendall Dunkelberg

I am a poet, translator, and professor of literature and creative writing at Mississippi University for Women, where I direct the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. I am Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, and I have published four collections of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus, and the textbook A Writer's Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. I was born and raised in Osage, Iowa, and have lived for over thirty years in Columbus, Mississippi, where my wife Kim and I let wildflowers grow in our yard to the delight of spring polinators and only some of our neighbors.

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