Gillian Conoley who will be returning this summer as poetry faculty at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, writes inventive and exploratory verse that challenges the reader to understand a fragmented and layered narrative that often spans across the page. She is an inventor of form and a cataloguer of image much like her predecessors Jack Spicer and Michael Palmer. Many of her poems set forth creating their own diorama of a surreal world the reader enters and learns to make sense of.
She has published eight collections including her latest, A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems, Nightboat Books, 2019 (Read a review of her book by Poetry Director Iris Jamahl Dunkle here).
When she isn’t on the faculty at Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Conoley is the Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University and is the founder and editor of Volt. She was born in Austin, Texas and raised in a nearby small town where her mother and father operated a country western radio station.
Read a poem by Gillian Conoley: “A hatchet with which to chop at the frozen seas inside us” from Peace
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57859/a-hatchet-with-which-to-chop-at-the-frozen-seas-inside-us
Essential Viewing: Gillian Conoley gives a craft talk at the International Writing Program Craft on the use of the page in poetry https://vimeo.com/349337201
