Shawn Sturgeon
Shawn Sturgeon was born in western Nebraska in 1965. He was educated at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln and did postgraduate work in English at the University of North Texas
(MA) and the University of Cincinnati (PhD). His work has appeared in The New Republic,
The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, Pleiades,
Willow Springs and StoryQuarterly. His first collection of poems, Either/Ur,
was a finalist for The Paris Review Prize (2001) and was published by River City
Publishing in 2002, with an introduction by Richard Howard. Shawn Sturgeon has held
numerous fellowships: as a Charles Phelps Taft Fellow he studied Mexican Literature and
Culture while living in Mexico, and he has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and Walter
Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He has taught at the University of
Cincinnati, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Emory University, where he is currently
Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Statement of Poetics
We are punished for our sins more quickly than is generally supposed, and I suppose my
punishment (or yours) is this statement of poetics. Whatever poems have saved me (or I
have saved) had nothing to do with statements about poetics, which are vain things,
anyway, like strangers at parties who tell their life’s story: Hopefully they will be
interesting, certainly they will be long. Words loosed on the mind create their own
expressions, and the best the poet can do is offer points of departure. I’m not sure
why I wrote these poems, but I wouldn’t do it again.