Thomas R. Smith                                           
Presenter: Writing at the Foot of the Rainbow: How Poetry Can Get Us Through Hard Times

Writing about Thomas R. Smith, Robert Bly said “[he] is a high-spirited poetry horse riding over the hills of emotion.”

As a poet, essayist and editor, Smith’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals in the US, Canada and the UK. His poems have reached mass audiences on Garrison Keillor’s public radio show The Writer’s Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry.

 Thomas is the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Keeping the Star (New Rivers Press, 1988), Horse of Earth (Holy Cow! Press, 1994), The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), Waking Before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press, 2007) and The Foot of the Rainbow (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010).

Smith lives in River Falls, Wisconsin, and currently works as a Master Track instructor in poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

About his presentation, Thomas states that this participatory workshop will ask the question, “How can poetry uniquely sustain both poets and readers during hard times?” Drawing on his recent poetry collection, The Foot of the Rainbow, Smith will address the ways that poetry, through imaginative perception, can better equip us to meet the challenges we face daily in our tumultuous world.

“We carry our rainbows inside us,” Smith says. This provides a way of looking at things that can transform difficulty into growth, challenge into joy, and isolation into community. Thomas will focus especially on the work of Pablo Neruda as an example of a poet using all of the resources of poetry to keep his or her heart alive despite adversity

 He invites you to check out poems and essays on his web site at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.

(Photo by Jens Gunelson)