MARY PINARD | Poet in Residence

Saturday, June 3, 2017

The Volland Store welcomes Mary Pinard, our first poet-in-residence, May 26 – June 6, 2017.  

Mary has enjoyed residencies in the southern part of the Flint Hills and is looking forward to experiencing our part of the tallgrass prairie. We know she will like it.

MARY PINARD teaches poetry and literature at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. She earned a B.A. in English and Theatre from Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN), an M.A. in English from University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. She was born and raised in Seattle.

My more recent work has been consumed by my love for and concern about the prairie  -Mary Pinard

In describing her current work, Pinard writes: “Over the last few years, I have become increasingly moved by loss in nature—this grows from loss in my own life, I’m quite sure—and I have also understood more clearly the urgency of and connection to the threats to sustainability in certain (all?) ecosystems. For me, two are of particular concern: the estuary and the prairie. My first book, Portal, explores a personal story of loss, but situates it in the larger context of the estuary and the ways in which its defilement imperils us all. My more recent work has been consumed by my love for and concern about the prairie. Again, there is a strong personal connection for me—my parents and their parents before them were born in South Dakota and Minnesota—but through this personal lens I have begun to understand the larger complexity, beauty, and vestigial reality of this extraordinary (and vanishing) ecosystem. My second book (which is in the works) has at its core the prairie and tries to suggest the ways in which elegizing it both acknowledges its loss but also attempts to reimagine its future.”

Over the last 15 years, Pinard has also collaborated with several visual artists and musicians in the Boston area, where her poems have been variously incised in glass (“Fragment House,” Slocum River Reserve, Dartmouth, MA), shaped in wire (“Lineage,” Old Frog Pond Farm, Harvard, MA), adhered to an exhibit wall (“Breaking Prairie,” Hollister Gallery, Babson College), and set to music (“On the Wing: A Celebration of Birds in Words and Music,” collaborative performance piece presented in a range of venues in the Northeast).

Professor Pinard’s poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals—including The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review—and she has been the recipient of several national awards for her poetry. Portal, her collection of poems, was published in 2014 by Salmon Press (Ireland). Her essays on poetics and poets, including Alice Oswald and Lorine Niedecker, have been published in critical anthologies and scholarly journals.

More information about her poetry, public readings, and publications can be found at www.marypinard.com.

The Volland Store is located at 24098 Volland Road, eight miles southwest of Alma, Kansas, on Old K-10 Highway,

 
then ¼ mile south on Volland Road. vollandfoundation.org

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