OXFORD, Miss. – Award-winning poet Jessica Fisher visits
the University of Mississippi Monday (Sept. 10) as part of
the Grisham Visiting Writer Series.
09/05/2007
OXFORD, Miss. – Award-winning poet Jessica Fisher visits
the University of Mississippi Monday (Sept. 10) as part of
the Grisham Visiting Writer Series.
Fisher, an Oxford native and graduate of Oxford High
School, is scheduled to give a 7 p.m. reading at the Ole
Miss-Oxford Depot. The event is free and open to the
public. The reading follows Fisher’s 5 p.m. book signing
and reception at Off Square Books.
Fisher’s first book of poetry, “Frail-Craft” (Yale
University Press, 2007), won the 2006 Yale Series of
Younger Poets competition, “the most distinguished literary
award given to poets under age 40,” said Gary Short,
professor of English.
“Jessica Fisher’s visit is a welcoming back of sorts,
because she is a graduate of Oxford High School who has
gone on to great things at Swarthmore College and the
University of California, Berkeley,” Short said. “The poems
in her new book are smart and beautifully written; they
exhibit both intelligence and heart,”
The author of numerous poems and translations, Fisher is
enrolled in the doctoral degree program in English at the
University of California at Berkeley. Her poems have
appeared in such journals as The Colorado Review, The New
Yorker, The ThreePenny Review and TriQuarterly. She is
co-editor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street
Anthology.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Gluck, a former United States
poet laureate, wrote the foreword in Fisher’s new book. She
describes Fisher’s poetry as being “haunting, elusive,
luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is.
Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or
connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a
language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor
dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist
injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior.
Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is
converted into thinking.”
For more information or for assistance related to a
disability, contact Gary Short at 662-915-6642 or
gshort@olemiss.edu.