Butler’s visiting professor Dana Roeser reads from her poetry.

When: Monday April 6, 7:30 PM
Where: Butler University, Clowes Hall Krannert Room

Dana Roeser’s second book, In the Truth Room, was the winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her first book of poems, Beautiful Motion, received the Morse Prize (judged by Ellen Bryant Voigt) in 2004 and was published by Northeastern University Press that year. In 2007 she received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005, she won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Beautiful Motion and the 2005-2006 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship. Ms. Roeser’s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Passages North, Sou’wester, Prairie Schooner, Laurel Review, Pool, Shade, The Literary Review, and other journals, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She has received fellowships to Yaddo, Ragdale, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Le Moulin à Nef (VCCA France). She has given readings of her work at George Washington University, Sweet Briar College, the Indiana Poetry Festival, Chapters Literary Bookstore (Washington, DC), Indiana University South Bend, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Marshall University, the Virginia Festival of the Book, the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia, Butler University, as well as several colleges and universities in the Great Lakes Colleges Association (Denison, Antioch, Wooster, Albion, Kenyon, Hope, Wabash, and Depauw). For several years, she taught creative writing at Butler University. In 2008-2009, Ms. Roeser is a visiting professor at Purdue University.

“In the Truth Room suggests the shape and necessity of a life, at once dramatically compelling and immediately believable, one in which children are eating smores while watching a Fawlty Towers video, and Volvos are skidding on ice, and people are going to 12-step meetings, museums are being visited, and jobs and essential human relationships hang in the balance. … On the face of it, the story at the center of the book seems archetypal: a daughter in midlife making sense of ongoing experience in the wake of her mother’s death while dealing with substantial crises and, eventually, undertaking what amounts to a pilgrimage. The overarching theme is individual, feminist, contemporary: how does a woman know herself apart from convention and duty? Certainly the intense poems about the mother are key to this theme. But In the Truth Room is less about one life than a fabric of interwoven lives: four generations of family, friends, dear ones, present and departed—I would be hard-pressed to name a poetry book that develops and displays affection for more characters, or, for that matter, one that contains more life.”—from the introduction by Rodney Jones

“In a time so eager to see wisdom usurped by information, it is especially wonderful to come upon poems whose every occasion shines from within: with mind, with candor and with bright consideration. Dana Roeser is one of our most truly thoughtful poets, and I rejoice in the continuing venture of her work.”—Donald Revell

“Wry, thoughtful, brooding, navigating seamlessly between future, present and past, between subjective and outer life, Dana Roeser’s lanky poems are neck deep in life, and relentlessly intent on learning the truth. She has her own charming and muscular prosody, she tells lively, moving stories, but it is the determined persistence of their very human speaker which drives the poems. They keep drilling into, pushing and prying, trying to find the deepest chambers of experience, where the mystery dwells. In The Truth Room is a wonderful book by a fully-developed and original poet.”—Tony Hoagland

And for your listening pleasure …

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