UNT assistant professor of English national Creative Writing Fellowship

While growing up in a house full of books, Corey Marks spent many evenings listening to his mother, a high school English teacher, recite poetry.

"When I read a poem today, sometimes I will think, 'I've heard this before,' and it turns out to be something my mother read to me when I was very young," Marks says.

Always attracted to books and to reading, Marks discovered the poetry of Robert Frost when he was in high school and vowed to become a poet himself.

Now the UNT assistant professor of English is the author of one book of poetry and is creating another, thanks to a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Marks is one of 38 individuals in the United States — and one of only four in Texas — to receive a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry for this year.

The fellowship, which allows creative writers of exceptional talent to set aside time to write, research, travel and advance their talent, will provide him with $20,000. He is the third UNT English faculty member to win an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship since 2001.

Marks says the fellowship will help him finish his second book of poetry. He says the still-untitled collection, with 60 to 75 pages, will include several poems set in a northern landscape by a lake.

"I grew up in rural Michigan, and I spent time at Lake Superior, which may or may not be the lake in these poems," he says.

Other poems in the book will focus on historical figures, including early 20th-century Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez and naturalist William Bartram, who in the 1700s became the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation.

Marks says he draws inspiration for his poetry from other poets.

"I'm always reading poetry as well as writing it," he says. "Sometimes I look at poems that are similar in the subject matter to what I'm working on, but by looking at poems that sound radically different from mine, I find new possibilities for my work."

Marks published his first collection of poetry, Renunciation, in 2000 after winning the 1999 National Poetry Series Open Competition. The subject matter for the poems in Renunciation ranges from the sculptor Gislebertus, the apostle Thomas and poet John Keats to a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, a blind girl in South America and a herd of swine.

His poems have been published in the New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily and TriQuarterly, among other publications. He received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2001. Marks is also an editor for American Literary Review.

A UNT faculty member since 2000, Marks has also taught at the University of Houston. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich.; his master of fine arts degree in creative writing-poetry from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C.; and his doctoral degree in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston.

BY NANCY KOLSTI nkolsti@unt.edu

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