Steve Scafidi will be at the W.Va. Book Festival, October 13 and 14, 2007, at the Charleston Civic Center. Some people say he’s the best poet in W.Va.

He is an amazing word magician. Reminds me of what the poet Robert Wallace said, “No magic, no poem.” You’ll see what I mean. You’ll know it… his subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Parks, Karla Faye Tucker, prayer, Ovid, marriage, Johnny Cash, nature, eroticism, hope, despair.

You’ll hear his voice — full and clear and strong….
Born and raised in Virginia, Scafidi (MFA, Arizona State University) works as a cabinet maker and lives with his wife and two children in Summit Point, West Virginia.

He is the winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University and the James Boatwright Prize from the literary journal “Shenandoah” …. His poems have appeared in “American Poetry Review,” “Southern Poetry Review” and elsewhere.

The Levis prize, by the way, is in memory of Larry Levis, a beloved poet and Virginia Commonwealth teacher who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of 49. This year’s Levis prize was awarded to Joshua Weiner for his collection “From the Book of Giants,” published by The University of Chicago Press. Weiner will read at VCU sometime this September.

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In “Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer,” Scafidi’s striding, long-sentence poems pick you up and carry you away like an ocean wave.

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Click here for a 2002 interview with Steve Scafidi in “Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.”

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Steve Scafidi’s books:
“Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer” (2001)
“For Love of Common Words” (2006)

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