Award-Winning Poet & Alumna Joanne Dominique Dwyer Visits SFUAD Today

The Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) Creative Writing Department will host alumna Joanne Dominique Dwyer ('05), a published poet and 2008 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship recipient, on campus beginning today, Sept. 23, and continuing tomorrow, the 24th.

Dwyer will visit several SFUAD creative writing classes and will give a reading in the O'Shaughnessy Performance Space on Tuesday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m. The event, free and open to the public, will be followed by a brief Q&A session and book signing.

According to publisher Sarabande Books, Dwyer's first book, Belle Laide (May 2013), "is a first book that reads like a third or fourth collection by a strong poet in mid-career: The voice is fully formed and idiosyncratic, the concerns obsessive, profound, and unmistakably central to the poet's life. Sexton and Plath are obvious influences, and Belle Laide bears a familial resemblance to books by these iconic Confessionalists."

"A whirling, Dionysian poet. . . . Dwyer negotiates brazenly with huge tracts of the human condition. Her leaping imagination will make you laugh out loud. The poems in Belle Laide are a rodeo; hang on to your saddle, cowboy."

-Tony Hoagland

In addition to receiving accolades for her first book, Dwyer is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award (2008), a Bread Loaf Scholar award, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize and The American Poetry Review's Jerome J. Shestack Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Conduit, FIELD, Many Mountains Moving, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly and other magazines. She resides in Northern New Mexico and works as a facilitator for the Brooklyn-based Alzheimer's Poetry Project. Dwyer was recently awarded a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation to work with at-risk teens in Bernalillo, N.M., on a project she created called "Poetry and Identity."

"From the moment Joanne arrived to study creative writing with us, she was a protean presence," said Dana Levin, co-chair of the Creative Writing and Literature Department. "I knew she'd embark on an illustrious poetry career: Talent this vivid doesn't rest. We're so proud and delighted to be able to bring her back to campus as our Fall visiting poet and spread the word about her fantastic first book."

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