Faculty selected for Best American Poetry

Peter Shippy, adjunct faculty member in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, was honored to hear that his poem “Our Posthumous Lives” was published in The Best American Poetry 2012, an anthology edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman. Shippy conducts poetry workshops and teaches literature classes in the undergraduate program, and will teach graduate students next semester. He has taught at Emerson for 26 years, and says that although it can be difficult to balance his writing and his teaching duties, he is “challenged by [his] students and…spurred by their work,” so the busy schedule is worth it.

Shippy was originally interested in writing novels, and worked briefly as a journalist. He soon realized he preferred creative writing over writing about facts. Fortunately, he discovered his true passion for poetry.

WLP Professor and Interim Dean of the School of the Arts Daniel Tobin has published six books of poems and has received various awards, including the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Tobin’s poem “The Turnpike” was also published in The Best American Poetry 2012. It was inspired by a poem by John Donne titled “The Valediction Forbidding Morning.”