UNT faculty member receives NEA Creative Writing Fellowship

As a small child, Bruce Bond was attracted to the folksongs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen for the lyrics as well as the melodies.

His discovery of William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot in high school and college sparked an inerest in writing. However Bond did pursue a music career.

"For a while, I thought I might go into songwriting. I even earned a master's degree in classical guitar," he says. He spent several years as a classical and jazz performer.

In the end, his early love of words won him over.

Now the UNT assistant professor of English is the author of four books of poetry. He recently became one of 34 individuals in the United States to receive a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry for 2001 from the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program. The fellowships allow creative writers of exceptional talent to set aside time to write, research, travel and advance their talent.

Bond recently became one of 34 individuals in the United States — and the only Texan — to receive a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry for the year 2001 , which will provide him with $20,000. He is also the only individual from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to receive an NEA grant for 2001.

Bond says the fellowship will help him either start a book of critical essays on contemporary poetry or start his fifth book of poetry, which will include a centerpiece poem about Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. His poems, written in free as well as metrical verse, focus on subjects ranging from Renaissance painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio's Biblical piece "The Supper at Emmaus" to less intellectual subjects such as a pomegranate and a red cardinal.

"I find it hard to capture the intensity of poetry in a folk song setting," Bond said.

He said he doesn't have a set time during the day for working on a poem.

"Part of the process of writing poetry is reinventing the process again and again, and having your senses and sensibility sharpened to the world," he said. "You never know where a poem will come from. I now keep a notebook to brainstorm ideas."

Bond published his first-length volume of poetry, Independence Days, in 1990. He is also the author of The Anteroom of Paradise, published in 1991; and Radiography, published in 1997. Radiography was selected for the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Bond's fourth volume of poetry, The Throats of Narcissus will be published later this year. In addition, Bond is the author of four poetry chapbooks.

He has been nominated for nine Pushcart Prizes for his poetry and was a finalist for the 2000 National Poetry Series. He received the 1998 Texas Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Austin Writers' League.

A UNT faculty member since 1997, Bond directs the creative writing program in the Department of English. He has also taught at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kan.; Lock Haven University in Lock Haven, Pa.; and the University of Kansas. In addition, he was a poet-in-residence at East Texas State University and Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and writer-in-residence at St. Catherine's College in St. Paul, Minn.

His poems have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Western Humanities Review, the Paris Review and the New Republic, among other journals. Bond has also published more than 15 essays on poetry, and is the current poetry editor for the American Literary Review.

He received his bachelor's degree in English from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., master's degree in English from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont; and doctoral degree in English from the University of Denver. Bond also holds a master's degree in music performance from the University of Denver.

BY NANCY KOLSTI nkolsti@unt.edu

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