Celebrate National Poetry Month with prize-winning poet Peter Schmitt in a Zoom webinar. In Goodbye, Apostrophe, his first new collection in more than a decade, the nationally recognized and prize-winning poet has assembled nearly 50 poems exemplary for their range and emotional power. From the hard lessons of childhood to the loss of parents, these poems confront the challenging issues of our time, including race, religion, abuse of varying kinds, and reflexive political correctness. By turns poignant and funny, elegiac and celebratory, formal and free, the mature work of a poet Richard Wilbur hailed as “one of the strongest talents in his generation” will resonate indelibly with any serious reader of American poetry.

Register through  Zoom.

“[Peter Schmitt]…presents a compelling, responsible, deeply felt and even exalted imagination that knows its way about the various worlds of immediacy, memory, dream, or fantasy, that we all inhabit in one way or another. His range is exemplary and, most persuasively of all, his poems are altogether without pretensions, as if they had been smelted down to draw off any possible impurities. They exhibit, in consequence, the ring of integrity so rare that it deserves the honor of our delight and gratitude.”—Anthony Hecht, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“[Peter Schmitt’s poems]…are elegantly simple. Within a straightforward style are subtleties of discovery and recognition. I am delighted by its evident authenticity amid so much current poetry that is self-consciously overelaborated and dishonest. Peter Schmitt takes profundity by surprise, himself surprised, it seems, at what he has found—he had not stalked it. He gives his attention generously to what he observes, to detail as to mass. A real poet.”—Denise Levertov, Robert Frost Medal-winning poet

[Peter Schmitt] “…is a kind of poet I particularly admire, a kind lately much too much in the minority: one who writes lucid poems in precise language about life as it is.”—Donald Justice, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“…Schmitt seems to me one of the strongest talents in his generation.” —Richard Wilbur, Poet Laureate of the United States and 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner

Peter Schmitt is the author of six collections of poems: Goodbye, Apostrophe (Regal House Publishing, 2020), Renewing the Vows (David Robert Books), Hazard Duty, and Country Airport (Copper Beech Press), and two chapbooks, Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices, and To Disappear (Pudding House). He has received the Lavan Award from The Academy of American Poets (selected by Richard Wilbur), the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize (judged by Anthony Hecht, Mary Jo Salter, and Nicholas Christopher), the Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College) and is twice a recipient of grants from the Florida Arts Council. He was awarded an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship. His poems have been featured on NPR’s Writers Almanac, and he is a winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival open competition. His work has appeared in many leading publications, including The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review, and been widely anthologized. He has reviewed poetry and fiction for the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and worked as a freelance editor of novels, short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalism. He is currently editing his late father’s WWII remembrance, Ferry Tales: A Navigator’s Memoir (McFarland, 2022).

A native Miamian and honors graduate of Amherst College, Schmitt studied with Richard Wilbur and received the College’s poetry prizes as a junior and senior. He attended the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where his teachers included Donald Justice. He has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Miami since 1986. Learn more about Peter here.