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SPOTLIGHT
ON THE ARTS - June 2005 by Deanna Mascle Shining the Light on Literary Arts Naslund follows Joe Survant as Kentucky’s poet laureate and will serve a two-year term. During her tenure as poet laureate, Naslund will promote the literary arts in Kentucky through readings and public presentations at meetings, seminars, conferences, and other programs across the state, including Kentucky Writers’ Day. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, Naslund has lived, taught and written in Kentucky since 1973. She majored in English at Birmingham Southern College, received a master’s degree with a creative thesis and completed the Ph.D. program with a creative dissertation at the University of Iowa. Before accepting a position at the University of Louisville, where she is a distinguished teaching professor, she also taught creative writing at the University of Montana, Indiana University-Bloomington and Vermont College. With her husband, physicist John C. Morrison, she served as 2003 Vacca Professor at the University of Montevallo, Alabama, and is currently the co-founder and program director of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University in Louisville. She is also the editor of the literary magazine, The Louisville Review, and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. The guidelines for selection of the Kentucky Poet Laureate state that, “the word poet in the position’s title is interpreted in its broadest sense to include persons whose accomplishments are in any of the recognized literary forms.” Naslund’s work has received critical acclaim and she enjoys best-seller status for her latest novels, Four Spirits (2003), and Ahab’s Wife (also called The StarGazer), which was selected by Time and Book Sense as one of the five best novels of 1999. It appeared on the Notable Book lists of The New York Times Book Review and Publisher’s Weekly and was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Currently there is an option on screen rights for the book. The publication of her novel Four Spirits was the fulfillment of a promise Naslund made to herself. “Back in the 1960s, witnessing the civil rights struggle in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself that if I ever did become a successful fiction writer that I would write about the courage and pain, the unspeakable cruelty and abiding love of those transformative times. It took nearly 40 years and the publication of five earlier books for me to have the confidence to try to tell the civil rights story as I had lived it, observed it, heard stories and read about it.” Naslund’s other titles include Ice Skating at the North Pole, The Animal Way to Love, Sherlock in Love, and The Disobedience of Water. She has also published fiction in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The American Voice, and other journals. Naslund has given more than 400 presentations about writing nationally and internationally. She is under contract with HarperCollins for a new novel about Marie Antoinette. She has received the Harper Lee Award, The Hall-Waters Southern Prize, and the Author Award of the Southeastern Library Association. As a young cellist, Naslund was once offered a college scholarship at the University of Alabama. Although she turned it down in order to pursue creative writing, her response to music infuses much of her work. The musicality of Naslund’s prose has inspired composer Frank Richmond’s music and lyrics, a work-in-progress, for Ahab’s Wife. Her novels have inspired theater productions as well. Very recently, she appeared at The Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery for the Southern Writers’ Project Festival of New Plays. She wrote, with Elaine Wood Hughes, from her latest novel Four Spirits, what is praised as “... an inspirational drama that tells the story of unsung heroes who risked their lives to help African Americans toward literacy in the turbulent world of the civil rights movement.” Naslund feels she has much to offer Kentucky through her new role. “I’ve spent a good portion of my life teaching literature and creative writing, in traditional settings such as the University of Louisville and in innovative settings such as the brief-residency MFA in Writing at Spalding University. I continually learn from my students and am inspired by their choices in subject matter, aesthetic structures, and stylistic techniques. I’ve learned how to benefit both from inspiration and from discipline in my own life as a writer. I’ve learned to regard rigorous revision as a joy and a privilege.” Deanna Mascle is a
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After a selection process coordinated by the Kentucky Arts Council, author and editor Sena Jeter Naslund has been named as the commonwealth’s newest poet laureate.