Louisiana Literature Press is proud to announce the publication of Vivian Shipley’s poetry collection, Hindsight: 2020.
The book is currently available for purchase through our press store (Please remember to specify title and author when submitting payment via PayPal.). The book will also be listed on Amazon.com in the near future.
From Hindsight: 2020
Turkeys
I hope none of them hold
memory of past Thanksgivings
and pity me because I can’t
flock with my family due to
a government travel ban.
Motorcycle gang swagger,
curving necks machine gun
cluck and gabble. I’m not
armed! Feathers polished
to walnut, russet, gray,
one flies at me. Then four
others surround my legs,
bobbing heads at my feet
as if daring me to break
their circle. No exit plan, I
have enough sense to keep
my hands by my thighs.
Will they believe me if
I tell them I am vegan?
About Our Author
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus,
Vivian Shipley was awarded a 2020-21 CT Office of the Arts Poetry
Fellowship, won the 2020-21 Poet Hunt from The MacGuffin
and was the Artist’s Choice for Rattle’s October 2020 Ekphrastic
Challenge. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12th book, An
Archaeology of Days (Negative Capability Press, 2019) was
named the 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist and the 2020
Housatonic Book Prize for Poetry Finalist. The Poet (Louisiana
Literature Press, SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press)
were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased,
(Louisiana Literature Press, SLU, 2010) won the 2011 Paterson
Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton
Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing.
Her sixth chapbook is Greatest Hits: 1974-2010 (Pudding House
Press, Youngstown, Ohio, 2010). She has received the Library of
Congress’s Connecticut Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to
the Literary Community and a Connecticut Book Award for Poetry
two times. She won the 2018-19 Steve Kowit Prize for Poetry from
San Diego Arts & Entertainment Guild and the Hackney Literary
Award for Poetry. Other poetry awards for individual poems include
the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the
Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, the Ann Stanford Poetry
Prize from the University of Southern California, the Marble
Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, the Daniel
Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club and the Hart
Crane Prize from Kent State. Raised in Kentucky, a member of the
University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni, the highest
award the university can bestow on an alumnus, she has a PhD
from Vanderbilt University and lives in North Haven, Connecticut
with her husband, Ed Harris.
Vivianshipley.net