James Hoch, a New Jersey poet whose work has been compared to songwriters Bruce Springsteen and Elliott Smith, will read from his poetry at Vanderbilt University.
Hoch will deliver the reading at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 19, in Room 101 of Buttrick Hall on the Vanderbilt campus.
The reading is free and the public is invited. A reception and book signing will follow.
“Troubled young men and boys scarred by their gritty surroundings animate this careful sophomore effort from Hoch, much of it focused on the city and the blue-collar suburbs of Philadelphia, where the poet grew up,” said Publishers Weekly in a review of Hoch’s book Miscreants. “Hoch’s weighty, short lines suggest Linda Gregorson’s, but his moods (and occasionally his allusions) instead conjure American singer-songwriters (like) doomed and sensitive Elliott Smith (and) blue-collar laureate Bruce Springsteen, whose Jersey shore territory crops up here too.”
The reading is part of the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program at Vanderbilt.
Hoch is assistant professor of English at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He won a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007 and the 2008 Resident Poet fellowship from The Frost Place, a nonprofit educational center for poetry and the arts based at Robert Frost’s old homestead, which is owned by the town of Franconia, N.H.
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu