Tonight: Free Horror Poetry Reading by Brett Rutherford, October 18th 7:00 PM

Tonight

Brett Rutherford, Acclaimed Poet and EUP Alumnus to Perform a Reading of His Poetry Monday, October 18th at 7:00 PM, Baron-Forness Library Room 715.

This Halloween season, come to the Edinboro Library’s “attic” for an evening of spooky verse as we welcome Brett Rutherford for a reading of selections from his poems of the supernatural. This event is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Brett started his career as a poet as a student at Edinboro State College many years ago, running his own underground newspaper and designing, printing and hand-binding his first poetry chapbook. The supernatural has always been a major theme in his work. His poem cycle Things Seen in Graveyards features the Edinboro cemetery along the way to remote locales, from Salem to the Atacama desert in Chile. The press Brett founded in New York City in 1971, The Poet’s Press, has now published 189 books, highlighting a wide variety of neglected New York poets, as well as his special focus -- the poetry of the Gothic and supernatural. Following the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Brett made a trek to haunted Providence Rhode Island in 1985 – and stayed. The result was two horror novels; a biographical play about H.P. Lovecraft; a study of Poe’s doomed 1848 romance in Rhode Island; and, best of all, his own mammoth 275-page collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. Brett is in the area right now doing photography for a book that will bring together all his Pennsylvania poems, and then he is heading back to Providence for the Halloween premiere of an exciting new book: an annotated edition of the landmark 1801 anthology of supernatural poetry by Matthew Gregory Lewis, titled Tales of Wonder. A number of Brett’s poems have been set to music (vocal and orchestral) by William Alexander, emeritus professor of Music at Edinboro; a number of these works have been premiered by the Erie Philharmonic. All of the books written and published by Brett Rutherford can be seen at http://www.poetspress.org/.

Brett works at the University of Rhode Island as Coordinator of Distance Learning, and teaches in the Women’s Studies Department, where he has taught a multidisciplinary course on “The Diva,” and another on “Women in Science Fiction: From Shelley to Sigourney Weaver.” Most recently he lectured for the National Endowment for the Arts in its Big Read series at Rhode Island College, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe. His other interests include classical music, and Chinese literature and art.