Poets Eimers and Skofield to read at APSU on Oct. 3

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – In early 2012, award-winning poet Nancy Eimers read a poetry collection that was tender and serious, but also deeply funny and playful.

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – In early 2012, award-winning poet Nancy Eimers read a poetry collection that was tender and serious, but also deeply funny and playful.

“This is a poet who pays attention to small wonders, who marvels that ‘sticks / can walk’ and ‘the roots of trees gather / forgotten rains,’ who takes to heart ‘the river's stillness behind a fallen log,’ and yearns over human fragility, a child's hand with its ‘twiggish bones, the little covering of skin,’” Eimers later wrote. “In and around and under the wit these poems are enormously tender.”

At the time, Eimers was serving as judge of the Austin Peay State University Zone 3 Press First Book of Poetry Award, and she awarded the prize to the manuscript in her hands, “Frost in the Low Area,” by Karen Skolfield. At 4 p.m. on Oct. 3, both poets will read from their work at the APSU Morgan University Center, Ballroom C. The event is free and open to the public.

Skolfield teaches travel writing and technical writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also earned her Master of Fine Arts. She is contributing editor at Bateau Press and the literary magazine Stirring, and her poems have appeared in 2011 Best of the Net Anthology, Cave Wall, Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, West Branch and others.

Eimers is the author of four poetry collections: “Oz,” “A Grammar to Waking,” “No Moon” and “Destroying Angel.” She has received a Whiting Writers Award, two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Field, Paris Review, The Nation, Antioch Review, North American Review and Triquarterly. Her work has also appeared in anthologies, such as “Best American Poetry,” “Poets of the New Century” and “The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.”

The Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry is a biennial contest hosted by APSU’s literary journal and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts. In alternate years, the press sponsors the Zone 3 Creative Nonfiction Book Award. For more information on the reading or the annual Zone 3 First Book Award for Poetry, contact Susan Wallace, Zone 3 editor, at wallacess@apsu.edu.