Northern Arizona Book Festival 2009

Mark Gibbons will be a featured author at the 2009 Norther Arizona Book Festival, in Flagstaff, Arizona. He will read along with Robert Bly, Bruce Aiken, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Diana Gabaldon and others. Visit the website for more information: http://www.nazbookfest.com/new/authors

Here's what the website has to say about Mark:
Mark Gibbons is a Montana poet. A lifelong resident of the Big Sky state, he lives with his wife in Missoula where he writes and teaches poetry for the Missoula Writing Collaborative, the Montana Arts Council, and Very Special Arts Montana. He has also worked most of the physical labor jobs available to blue-collar descendants determined to stay in Montana at all costs. For the last decade Gibbons has driven truck and moved furniture to make ends meet. He received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana where he studied with Greg Pape and Jack Gilbert. Influenced by the Beats, Bukowski, and rock and roll, Gibbons’ poems strive for music in plain spoken language. His poems have appeared in numerous journals around the country. His first collection, a chapbook Something Inside Us, appeared in 1995. A second chapbook, Circling Home, won the Scattered Cairns Press chapbook competition in 2000. Gibbons’ first full length collection of poems, Connemara Moonshine, was published by Two Dogs Press in 2002. blue horizon, also from Two Dogs Press, appeared in 2007. War, Madness, & Love, a joint collection of poems with Appalachian poet Michael Revere came out in December of 2008 from R & R Publishing. An abridged bilingual edition of Connemara Moonshine is being negotiated with a French publisher for release in 2009 or 2010. A new collection, Forgotten Dreams, is looking for a publisher.

The Salish poet, Jennifer Greene, says: “Mark Gibbons is a real Montana writer. He is a person deeply moved and shaped by this place, but his work is an authentic reflection of who he is as a person. He is not, in any way, writing about stereotypes about this place or about life in the West. In that way, his work is honest, authentic and universal.”

Ed Lahey, 2008 winner of the Governor’s Arts Award for a lifetime achievement in Literature, says: “Mark Gibbons is titanically gifted. He knows the hidden secret of love is mortality. Though his work is black ass dark and often violent, it is essentially spiritual if not religious, coming from the heart of a church without walls.”

Poet/songwriter Paul Zarzyski says: “blue horizon, Gibbons’ second book, reads more like a selected works choreographed from a dozen books written over a 50-year career. I wish I could let the poetry reading world know about this otherworldly lumper-poet living in obscurity in Missoula, where Dick Hugo, were he still with us, would most certainly be screaming Gibbons’ praises from the roof of the Liberal Arts building. Or better yet, Harold’s Milltown Bar & Laundromat. These poems speak my lingo to my ticker in spades!”