Here are two great writers with poetic sensibility, both very different, but with ties to West Virginia.
Read Wil Haygood’s “Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.” Reviewer Gerald Early calls it “one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written.”
Wil used to work at the Gazette. After leaving here, he embarked on an amazing career. He wrote a string of award-winning books and worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Boston Globe, and now at The Washington Post. Listen to an interview with Wil, on the Research Channel.
My wife Nancy went to Columbus last year to be a guest as Wil was honored and visited by friends virtually from all over the world.
Yesterday morning, I was playing around with a new app on my iPhone called Press Reader. I beamed up a March 8, 2010, Washington Post, and on Page One, there was a story by Wil Haygood in New York about problem politics centered on Rep. Rangel and New York Gov. Paterson. Wil’s writing has a poetic flair, a gentle touch; it entertains and sticks with you long after you put the book down, or the news story.
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Pinckney Benedict, native of Greenbrier County, W.Va., is the featured author in the Winter 2010 issue of Appalachian Heritage, and in celebration of that, he will read at Berea College, Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery, Berea, Ky., 8 p.m., Friday, March 12. Come at 7:30 p.m. for refreshments. For more information, call 859-985-3559.
He teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Ill.
Why Pinckney on a poetry blog? Well, his work is fed, by turns, with the fiction writer’s poetic sense of beauty, the strange and the dangerous.
Try out “Town Smokes,” a collection of nine stories.
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