Poet Patricia Clark
March 18, 2005
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Patricia Clark grew up in Tacoma, Washington, later graduating from the University of Washington with a B.A. in Economics. Her other degrees include an MFA from the University of Montana, where she studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Houston. Patricia is the author of North of Wondering, which won the first book award from Women in Literature Press and was published in 1999 (reissued in 2003, it is now available from Michigan State University Press). She is also the co-editor of Worlds in Our Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers, published by Blair Press/Prentice-Hall in 1997. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, Stand, and the Poets Against the War anthology (Nation Books). In 2003, she received a grant from ArtServe Michigan and was also awarded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Other awards include The Mississippi Review Poetry Award (1996), the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (1990), an award from the Fine Lines/Oil of Olay Contest co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America (2004), and residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.
She teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where she is Professor in the Department of Writing and the university's poet-in-residence. In her role at GVSU, Patricia coordinates the fall Poetry Night readings which have featured Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, and Charles Wright. She is also the director of GVSU's Writing in Ireland program, which brings students to Trinity College, Dublin and Queens University, Belfast.
"Wondering is a small town in Montana. In Patricia Clark's North of Wondering, with its ambitious allusion to Robert Frost's first collection North of Boston, place, culture, and climate intersect with reasoning and emotions to map the contours of wondering, as if the word itself were a small town, or a particular region, somewhere, that she wanted us to experience in all its complexity, from the nuances of questioning to marveling" - Mary Stewart Hammond