Poet and teacher Alice Derry, a resident of Port Angeles, will be the featured poet in Orcas’ celebration of National Poetry Month. She will read her poetry on Friday, April 24th at 7 p.m. in the Library, and will teach a workshop the following day. Derry is an accomplished reader of her work and has read widely. She has been a featured poet/teacher at the Skagit River Poetry Festivals. The Orcas Island Library and Friends of the Library are pleased to sponsor this reading for the community.
“Derry’s language is nearly always heightened yet plain, her project large yet simple: exploration of incidents in the human heart, in the name of survival and perhaps even betterment.” (Stephen Corey)
Derry’s first manuscript, Stages 0f Twilight, was chosen by Raymond Carver as the l986 King County (Seattle) Arts Publication Award winner. Carver said of the poems in a Seattle Times interview: “I felt she was writing about real things, things that counted. Her poems seemed honest in their conception and execution-they made a claim on my interest right away. I would even say they made a claim on my heart.”
Alice Derry was born in Oregon and raised in Washington and Montana. She holds an M.F.A. from Goddard College in Vermont, as well as an M.A. in English from The American University in Washington, D.C. Her poems have appeared in periodicals such as Southern Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, The Seattle Review, Hubbub, Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles. Derry has had poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize six times. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies.
Derry was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, as well as the Washington Community and Technical College Humanities Association Exemplary Status Award for her work in poetry-both her own and the promotion of others. In February of 2005, Derry was named Poet-in-Residence at the biennial conference of the National Association for Humanities Education.
Derry teaches English and German at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has co-directed the Foothills Writers’ Series bringing fine writers to the Peninsula in Washington State for more than 25 years. Her books include: Strangers to Their Courage, 2001, Clearwater, 1997, Stages of Twilight, 1986, Translations from Rainer Rilke, 2002, Not As You Once Imagined, 1993. Her fourth full collection, Tremolo, soon to be published, continues the strands of her three previous collections, discovering new ground and reaching deeper into her themes.
Alice Derry’s third volume of poems, Strangers to Their Courage, was a finalist for the 2002 Washington Book Award. Distilled from more than thirty years of experiences with the German people and their language, the book explores the meaning of Derry’s investment in a people compromised and reviled. In addition to poems, the manuscript contains a lengthy introductory essay.
Li-Young Lee has written of the book: “Here is a book whose ostensible subject is the story of a specific European family, but whose deeper subject is the human family in general. Written with the personal life at stake, these poems achieve a transpersonal significance and beauty. This book also asks us to surrender our simplistic ideas about race and prejudice, memory and forgetfulness, and begin to uncover a new paradigm for ‘human.'” Linda Bierds writes: “With clear prose and evocative poetry, Alice Derry has crafted a challenging book-a must-read for all concerned with the issues of human brutality and atonement.”
