January Faculty Feature: Joe Hutchison

Joe Hutchison: Poet, Writer, Editor, Writing and Literature Faculty

(Alice’s Note: Thank you, Joe, for providing the content for this feature and making it such a personable one. I did take the liberty of creating subheads.)

Personal Bio
I was born in Denver, on the westernmost edge of the Great Plains, on June 26, 1950. My father worked in the electric meter department of the local power utility, after serving in the Pacific as a Navy man. My mother was a homemaker, although she¹d been a "Rosie the Riveter" during the war and went back to work when my younger brother was in elementary school.

Neither of my parents read books for pleasure, but we had a lot of books in the house, on the theory that such things were good for kids. They were certainly good for me. I read whatever happened to come down from the shelf early on, but what I remember reading most breathlessly was Poe, and to this day my work displays many Poe-ish qualities.

I wrote throughout high school and my college years at the University of Northern Colorado, from which I graduated in 1972 Summa Cum Laude with a degree in English and Secondary Education. I received an MFA degree from the writing program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in 1974 and received my first real recognition as a poet that year, when I won a Macmillan Company of Canada Award for Poetry.I emerged from graduate school in the middle of a teacher glut. So, after a few years as a substitute teacher, I worked in the book business, taught in various Poets in the Schools programs and for various colleges and universities as an adjunct professor. All the while I've continued to write and publish poems, short stories, book reviews, and articles on the arts. In 1980, I stumbled into a job as a bank marketing writer, and I've made my living as a marketing writer and editor ever since.

What Joe Teaches: He’s Scheduled to Teach LIT 201 for Spring II
I also teach graduate level writing and literature courses both F2F and online for the University of Denver's University College, as well as undergraduate courses for CCCOnline, including English Composition, Creative Writing, and Masterpieces of Literature I (which I'm scheduled to teach in the current Spring II Session).

Joe as Published Poet
Along the way I've published four full-length books of poems and six chapbooks, including the 1982 Colorado Governor¹s Award volume, Shadow-Light. I also co-edited, with Gary Schroeder, the anthology A Song for Occupations: Poems About the American Way of Work. My third book, Bed of Coals, was the 1994 Colorado Poetry Award winner, and both it and my fourth full-length collection, The Rain At Midnight, were finalists for the Colorado Book Award. To date my work has appeared in over 100 journals and in several anthologies. A new collection entitled Thread of the Real is, as they say, "looking for a publisher."

Link to Joe’s Poetry Blog (Thanks for sharing the site, Joe, it’s terrific.)
I’ve also recently launched a poetry blog called The Perpetual Bird at jhwriter.blogspot.com. Everyone is welcome to visit and post comments there!

And last, Joe remarks that the CCCOnline Faculty Wiki is a great addition: http://www.facultywiki.ccconline.org/~www66/index.php?title=Main_Page