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Online Poetry: Medicine for the Soul featuring Peter Schmitt

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The Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives invites you to Online Poetry: Medicine for the Soul featuring poet Peter Schmitt on Wednesday, December 2, 2020 at 1:00 p.m. This event will be hosted virtually through The Stockbridge Library Zoom account.

Peter was blessed to grow up in a home full of books, with a mother who taught him to read and write at an early age. But from probably kindergarten on, he knew he wanted to be a doctor.  Peter published his first poem. “The Baseball Game,” at the age of twelve, in the children’s magazine, Highlights.

Peter Schmitt is the author of five previous collections of poems: Renewing the Vows (David Robert Books); Hazard Duty, and Country Airport (Copper Beech Press); and two chapbooks, Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices, and To Disappear (Pudding House).  He has received The Lavan Award from The Academy of American Poets (selected by Richard Wilbur); The “Discovery”/The Nation Prize (judged by Anthony Hecht, Mary Jo Salter, and Nicholas Christopher); The Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College); is a two-time recipient of grants from The Florida Arts Council; and was awarded a Fellowship from The Ingram Merrill Foundation.  His poems have been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Writers Almanac, and his poem, “Packing Plant,” won The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival open competition.  His work has appeared in such publications as The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Southern Review, and has been widely anthologized.  He has also reviewed poetry and fiction for The Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel.  A native Miamian, a Westinghouse National Science Talent Search Top 40 selection in high school, he graduated with honors from Amherst, and from The Writers Workshop at The University of Iowa.  His part-time jobs have included janitor, forklift operator, freelance journalist and editor, and he started his own business treating disease-susceptible palm trees.  Since 1986, he has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Miami.