Cathryn Hankla

Available from Mighigan State University Press & the usual suspects

Upcoming Events:
New Dominion Bookshop--Charlottesville, VA, March 3, 5:30
Randolph-Macon College--Ashland, VA, March 29-30
Radford University--Radford, VA, April 21, 7-9PM
Malaprops Bookstore--Asheville, NC, June 3, 7PM
Nimrod Hall Creative Writing Workshop--Bath Co., VA, July 24-30
Columbia, SC--Reading at USC, 3:30 PM, September 29, 2011
Southern Festival of Books--Nashville, TN, October 14-16, 2011--Reading Saturday Oct. 15 at 3:30
Roanoke Regional Writers Conference, on the Hollins Campus, January 27
Hollins University--Green Drawing Room, Thursday Feb.2, 8:15, w/​Amanda Cockrell
AWP-Chicago--Palmer House, 9AM Thursday, March 1, 2012,Panel: Unusual Points of View in Fiction
Virginia Festival of the Book, Charlottesville, VA, March 23, 4PM, Emmet St. Barnes and Noble

LAST EXPOSURES: The terrain of this poetic sequence begins with an exhibit in a San Francisco gallery and ends somewhere beyond the coast of Spain. From grief over the death of a parent to a landscape of larger losses and gains, these poems range and yet retain cohesion through the strategy of tercets.

My Appalachian novel, A BLUE MOON IN POORWATER, is set during 1968, a pivotal year of national disillusionment coupled with the excitement of the moon race. David Parks loses a co-worker in an underground explosion and embarks on a search for justice, caught between the union and the coal company. His daughter Dorie pieces together her family story, and what she reveals encompasses not only her father's conflict but also her older brother's downward spiral. Like Dorie, I grew up in far Southwest Virginia. Her fictional territory is the landscape of my childhood. (To order this or other books not pictured here, please see my expanded site. Click on the drumming picture below.)

A finalist for the 3rd Annual Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry, TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY: prose poems, (LSU 2000), takes its title from the gunman's nest in the assassination of JFK. Many of the poems are informed by my travels to the Czech Republic and France and address cross cultural ironies and contradictions.