Press Release:

Acclaimed poet Joshua Kryah will read from his work Thursday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Bookstore in the Morris University Center. The reading will be followed by a question and answer period, a book signing and a reception.

The newest addition to SIUE’s creative writing faculty, Kryah is the author of two poetry collections. We Are Starved (2011) was published by the University of Colorado Press as part of its New Mountain West Poetry Series. Glean (2007) was selected by Donald Revell for the 2006 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize.

Kryah’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review and Ploughshares among others. A St. Louis native, he earned a master’s of fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctorate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Schaeffer Fellow.

Kryah is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship. During 2013, he was the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College and the Summer-Poet-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Kryah’s awards include the Michael W. Gearhart Prize from The Southwest Review, selected by Timothy Liu, and the Third Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Carolyn Forché.

Critics and reviewers have called Kryah one of our “finest young voices,” and a poet who “is redefining what it means to write spiritual poetry.”

Writer Alex Lemon has said these “breathtakingly mature poems are fueled by a man’s internal combustion, the tremendous labor it is to live well – to be a father, a lover, a son – in a fallible world.”

For more information, contact Professor Geoff Schmidt at (618) 650-2289.