University of Iowa

Jude Nutter

Jude Nutter was born in North Yorkshire, England, and grew up near Hannover, in northern Germany. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and have received over forty awards and grants. Her first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), winner of the Irish Listowel Prize, was published in 2002. The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press), her second collection, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. A third collection, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (University of Notre Dame Press), was awarded the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in poetry and voted Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Review. In 2004-2005 Jude spent two months in Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation’s Writers and Artists Program.

Instructor Events

Pace Yourself: The Ways a Poem Moves

Weekend July 14 to July 15 2018

Poetic pacing is a delicate balance between anticipation and knowledge: poems should create in us a desire to know, a desire to discover, and yet keep us, as Stephen Dobyns states, “on the verge of understanding.” Pacing, then, is a kind of promise, and also a kind of tension, and it often begins with the poem’s title and first line. In this workshop, we will look at a variety of poems by master poets and explore how pacing—and hence the journey of discovery the poem enacts—is controlled.

The Freedom of Restraint: The Joy and Paradox of Formal Poetry

Weeklong July 15 to July 20 2018

Judith Barrington once said that her best work emerged “from between the scaffolding of a known form.” This is the joy and paradox of writing in form: the formal poem’s “rules” provide a safe framework and often force us to write things we couldn’t have written without the form’s parameters.