Readers & Writers Live: Doug Anderson in Conversation with Rich Michelson

About this event

Poet Doug Anderson will read from his new book There Was Only Smoke: New and Selected Poems (published October 15, Saturnalia Books) in this edition of the Readers and Writers Live series. Following his reading, Anderson will have a conversation with poet, children's book writer, and gallery owner Richard Michelson.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Broadside Bookshop, and Anderson will sign books following the program.

This event will also be livestreamed on the Forbes Library YouTube channel. Click here to view: https://youtube.com/live/LzB0h4B46u8?feature=share

About the writer:

Anderson grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He served as a combat medic in the Vietnam War, and after Vietnam attended the University of Arizona, where he studied acting. He started writing poetry after he moved to Northampton and worked with the poet Jack Gilbert and Group 18, a poetry writing workshop, founded in 1985 by poets Linda Gregg and Jim Finnegan.

Anderson has written about his experiences in the Vietnam War in both poetry and nonfiction. He is the author of the poetry collections The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000). In 2009 he published his memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery, published by W.W. Norton (2019). His most recent book is Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Press, 2015). He has taught in the Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College MFA programs and Smith and Emerson Colleges. He lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

His awards include a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Anderson has taught at the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.