Gail Griffin is a professor emeritus of English at Kalamazoo College, where she taught from 1977 to 2013. She’s the author of the nonfiction books The Events of October: Murder-suicide on a Small Campus and Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces, as well as her first poetry chapbook, Virginals: A Book of Elizabethan Interiors. Omena Bay Testament is her first full-length poetry collection, spanning nearly a lifetime of writing. The collection won the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize.
“I’ve been writing and publishing poetry, off and on, since the 1980s, since I ran into Conrad Hilberry at Kalamazoo College and he encouraged me,” Griffin says. “But I never thought of putting it into a collection. It was just sort of dribs and drabs of poetry along the way. About two years ago, I said to myself, ‘All right, it’s now or never.’ I pulled them all together and put them in a big pile on my desk and read through everything to see whether I thought there was a collection there.”
There was. And Two Sylvias Press agreed. Griffin was awarded the Wilder Prize in 2021, with publication in April 2023.
Griffin considers why she often chooses to write prose, but at other times poetry, the two occasionally sharing space, as they do in her memoir, Grief’s Country, interspersed between chapters.
“With poetry, I go deep into one moment or one insight,” she says. “In prose, I generally go wide. The wideness of prose might involve a number of moments, but poetry just seems to me to stop time for a minute and to allow me to really dwell in the moment and find out what’s there for me.”
Griffin says the poetry collection also felt like something of a memoir, spanning some thirty years of her life.
“With some exceptions,” she notes. “There are big parts of my life left out. But the four sections of the book do certainly correspond to four areas of my life, and it’s pretty autobiographical, at least the first three sections.”
Griffin will have a book launch and reading at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 27, at the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University. Registration for the free event is not required, but seating is limited.
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