Converse English Professor Serves as Poetry Expert for TV
On Saturday, April 25th, Converse English professor Rick Mulkey was a guest on WYFF-TV. During the segment, Mulkey talked about poetry and the Converse Creative Writing program. He was invited to participate in a series of interviews that the NBC affiliate had with regional poets on Saturday mornings during April to celebrate National Poetry Month. During the program, Mulkey read a poem from his recently published book Toward Any Darkness (Word Press).
Also serving as Director of Converse’s Creative Writing program, Mulkey is author of Before the Age of Reason, Bluefield Breakdown, Greatest Hits: 1994-2004. His work appears in the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry anthology, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of venues such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Connecticut Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review and Verse Daily.
Mulkey has received several awards including the Hawthornden Fellowship and the Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Award. Formerly the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Wichita State University, he has taught at a number of universities and writing workshops in the United States and Europe. His teaching interests at Converse include Creative Writing: poetry, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Science and Literature. In addition to directing the BFA Creative Writing major at Converse, he founded and teaches in the Converse College Young Writers Summer Workshop. Recently he has been a visiting writer at Michigan State University, Wichita State University and Radford University, among others. In 2003, he received Converse College’s O’Herron Award for Faculty Excellence