ODU's M.F.A. Creative Writing Program Hosts Poetry Craft Workshop Today

Norfolk native Jorn Ake, winner of the 2008 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, will be on the Old Dominion University campus today, Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in the Batten Arts and Letters Building (room 2009) to discuss the art of writing poetry. His lecture is free and open to the public.

Ake won the Blue Lynx Prize for "Boys Whistling like Canaries" (EWU Press, 2009), which he began working on while in Prague, where he lived for three years.

A graduate of Norfolk's Maury High School, Ake went on to attend the College of William and Mary, where he received a bachelor's degree in fine arts. After receiving an M.F.A. in creative writing from Arizona State University, his first collection of poems, "Asleep in the Lightning Fields," won the 2001 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2002.

A chapbook of his work, "All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems," is available from Popular Ink, and his newest full-length collection, "The Circle Line" (The Backwaters Press, 2009), was published in September.

He will also give a reading at Prince Books, in downtown Norfolk, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22.