Award-winning poet Anders Carlson-Wee gave a free public reading from his new book, “The Low Passions,” on Thursday, Oct. 3 at 7 p.m. at Marathon Center for the Performing Arts. As a University of Findlay guest, Carlson-Wee visited an undergraduate creative nonfiction class. He is also served as this year’s multimedia contest judge for Slippery Elm, UF’s literary journal.
Carlson-Wee’s work has appeared in BuzzFeed, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and more. His debut chapbook, “Dynamite,” won the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference; and won the 2017 Poetry International Prize.
“The Low Passions,” published this year by W.W. Norton, “traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter,” he explains at his website. “Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging for forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith.”
Carlson-Wee holds a Master of Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.