Tom Chandler, Rhode Island
Tom
Chandler holds degrees from Brown University and the University of New
Hampshire. He is a winner of the Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize and has been
named the Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Brown. He is the author of three books
of poetry—Wingbones, One Tree Forest, and The Sound
the Moon Makes As It Watches—and has published in literary journals
such as Poetry, Boulevard, New York Quarterly, Atlanta
Review, and many others. He teaches poetry writing and fiction writing
at Bryant College and is the editor of the Bryant Literary Review.
Appointment: 2000, appointed by governor
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In my state, where town bleeds into tangled town stretched around a piece of sea, everyone you see is your neighbor next door or might as well be, each with a complicated story wanting to be told. Since the days of Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams, Rhode Island has been home to an astonishing variety of cranks and geniuses—a real rogue’s island, as we were known in Colonial days—a graceful, salty country of more than a million defiantly independent poets, all of us gazing out to sea, searching for the best way to get it said right. Being selected poet laureate of such an eccentric pocket of people is of course wonderful, and a genuine obligation.
–Tom Chandler
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