Local Poet Steve Straight

“Steve Straight is a poet of everyday experience whose disarmingly casual voice can lead the reader into deeper waters of insight and modest epiphanies. Every one of the poems in The Almanac achieves that rare thing in the streets of contemporary poetry: they are just plain interesting.” —Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States

Straight, of South Windsor, is a retired professor of English and former director of the poetry program at MCC. His previous full-length collections include The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002), which was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. For many years he directed the Connecticut Poetry Circuit. He also directed the Seminar Series for the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. He has given workshops on writing and teaching throughout the eastern United States. In 1998 he was named a Distinguished Advocate for the Arts by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.