The University of Iowa

Max Garland

Max Garland is the author of The Word We Used for It, winner of the 2017-18 Brittingham Poetry Prize. Previous books include The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition. He has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, a Michener Fiction fellowship, inclusion in Best American Short Stories, a Bush Foundation Literary Fellowship, and fellowships in both poetry and fiction from the Wisconsin Arts Board. A native of Kentucky, where he worked as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he is Professor Emeritus at UW-Eau Claire and the current Writer-in-Residence for the city of Eau Claire. He is also a musician and songwriter, and the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.

Instructor Events

The Poetry of Memory

Weeklong June 21 to June 26 2020
Instructor(s): 
Max Garland

"If we spend our lives remembering what we love/ to be sure who we are..." begins a Richard Hugo poem. The poet goes on, partly recalling and partly fabricating a remembrance of place and time. Of course, we don’t only remember “what we love,” but also what we lose, lack, long for, and even loath. But this combination of recovery and creativity, the shaping, re-shaping, recalling and revising that constitutes memory is, perhaps not coincidentally, very much the process of poetry.