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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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James Wright: A Life in Poetry
I just finished Jonathan Blunk‘s powerfully moving biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. It is everything a great biography should be: a delicate balance between passing time and the abiding genius that seems to irrupt from a region outside of time. Given his family background, Wright was a person who should never have fallen in love with language, but thanks to some sensitive and insightful early teachers, he did, and so we have the opportunity when we read him to fall in love with it in poem after poem.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
