Poet Philip Belcher in Conversation with John Lane

Join us in the Bookshop at 6pm on Tuesday, November 8th for a reading and conversation with poet Philip Belcher, whose first full-length collection is Gentle Slaughter, a volume exploring memory and art, the inevitability of limitation, and the challenges of living with decline. A graduate of the Converse University MFA program, Belcher is the winner of the Porter Fleming Writing Competition Prize in Poetry and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Prize. He will be in conversation with John Lane, co-founder of the Hub City Writers Project and author of, most recently, Still Upright and Headed Downstream.

This event is free and open to all; meet us at the Bookshop! 

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About the Book

Philip Belcher’s first full-length collection of poems reveals a poet probing memory and art—their jumble of fact and imagination—to explore the challenges of living with full awareness of decline, of acknowledging failure to meet one’s own expectations, and of accepting the inevitability of limitation. Influenced by a long line of southern poets, including R.T. Smith, Claudia Emerson, Rodney Jones, and Steve Scafidi—poets whose poems stretch far beyond what might be labeled regional—Belcher’s poems also echo Dickinson’s theological reflections, Philip Levine’s discovery of the profound in the quotidian, Hayden Carruth’s absorption in place, and Philip Larkin’s overarching pessimism. These poems, usually meditative, do not neglect humor or beauty but do not employ them in a way that distracts from the reality of lives ultimately governed by grief.

About the Author

Philip Belcher is the author of a chapbook, The Flies and Their Lovely Names (Stepping Stones Press, 2007), and a full-length poetry volume, Gentle Slaughter (MadHat Press, 2022). He has won the Porter Fleming Writing Competition Prize in Poetry, the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Prize, and Shenandoah‘s Carter Prize for the Essay, and his poems and critical prose have appeared in numerous journals. He earned degrees from Furman University (BA), Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div.), The Duke University School of Law (J.D.), and Converse University (MFA). He works in philanthropy and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

About the Conversation Partner

John Lane is Emeritus Professor of environmental studies at Wofford College and was founding director of the college’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including most recently, Still Upright and Headed Downstream. In 2014 he was inducted into the SC Academy of Authors. He, with his wife Betsy Teter, is one of the
co-founders of Spartanburg’s Hub City Writers Project.