Recently, this article (written by the College editor, John Dudley ’95) appeared in The Hampden Sydney Record

2006 Poetry Review published

The Winter 2006 issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review features cover art by Virginia artist Homer Springer.

Hampden-Sydney’s poet-in-residence, Tom O’Grady, has published the Winter 2006 issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, continuing the “correspondence between poets” that he started in the early 1970s. Since the beginning, O’Grady has published both known and unknown poets and many poems in translation, particularly the work of Eastern European poets. “We published many Eastern European poets before the fall of the Iron Curtain, which was not easy to do,” recalls O’Grady.

Poets published in The Review include more than a dozen winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as well as numerous winners of the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. O’Grady says over the years more than 25 poets published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review have won at least one of those awards. The Review itself was propelled to national prominence in 1976 when it received the Editor’s Prize from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Occasionally, O’Grady publishes a thematic collection. One issue in the 1980s focused on new Czech poets. The 2004 issue heralded poetry of the sea. In 1990, O’Grady published an anthology that included select works from The Review’s first 15 years as well as some new work. Among the new poets that year, four went on the win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

“It’s really amazing that we get the quality of work that we do,” says O’Grady, “because the poets get no pay, just two copies of the publication.”

The current issue features a widely established collection of poets who, O’Grady speculates, have published more than 500 books. He says, “David Wagoner has published at least 25 books. Dabney Stuart has published about 20 volumes. And then you have people like Marge Piercy who is also a novelist and David Huddle who writes short stories. So, you have a people in this collection who are more than just poets.”

O’Grady will be retiring after the fall 2007 semester, though he will continue working on what will by then be the 2008 issue of The Review. He says, “I hope that I will be working on that issue with the person who will be taking over as editor.”

Subscriptions are available to the public for $10 per annual issue; contact the editor at post office box 126, Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943.

FROM THE RECORD OF HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE, APRIL 2007. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.