Murray State's MFA in Creative Writing Reading Series runs Saturday through next Wednesday. Poet Rodney Jones is the first guest author for the Series. Jones is a professor and distinguished scholar emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a Kingsley-Tufts Award among honors for his poetry. He stopped by WKMS to give a look into his writing style and even read some of his work.
Jones grew up in rural Alabama, a place where modern conveniences didn’t take root for some time. He says that experience shaped a lot of his writing.
“I think I got to see several things that most people of my generation didn’t see,” Jones said.
One of his poems is called “TV”, and talks a bit about how television reshaped communities’ like Jones as industrialization tried to penetrate all corners of the country in the 1950s.
You can hear “TV” and more of Jones’ prose in the audio clip above.
He reads Saturday, January 3rd at 7:30 p.m. in the Murray Visitor's Center; the event’s open to the public.
