David Allan Evans, South Dakota
David
Allan Evans names his strongest influence as his father, who worked as
a newspaper pressman most of his life, but who was also a self-educated
writer and scholar. Evans, who himself has an abiding interest in biology
and ecology, is the author of five books of poems and three books of prose.
His short stories, poems, and essays have been published in numerous magazines
and journals, and in more than seventy anthologies. He has won writing
grants from the NEA and the Bush Artist Foundation, and has twice been
a Fulbright scholar to China. He lives in Brookings, where he is a professor
of English and writer in residence at South Dakota State University.
Appointment: 2002
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I want to promote poetry in my state in any way that I can, with an emphasis on youth. I’ve worked with K-12 kids for more than 25 years, in projects sponsored by the state Arts Council, and I’ll keep encouraging students to read and write poems, and their teachers to emphasize poetry more in their classrooms. I intend to conduct workshops, give readings and talks, organize poetry-writing contests, and ask librarians across the state to display poetry. We know that feelings came first in the human brain’s evolution; they’re the great motivators of thought and action. The things that really matter to us are the ones that are, in the poet John Keats’s phrase, “proved upon our pulses.” I want to show others that poetry can be pleasurable for its own sake, but that it can also have life-enhancing power. It can help us remember and celebrate. It can open us up to the wonders of our daily lives. It can help us find some self-control and peace when we feel apprehensive—“a momentary stay against confusion,” is the way Robert Frost put it.
–David Allan Evans
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