Award-winning poet to read works

Award-winning poet Todd Boss will read a selection of his compositions at Northwestern College when he is featured in the school’s Deep Song Reading Series on Wednesday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m. The event will be held in Te Paske Gallery of Korver Visual Arts Center. It is free and open to the public.

In addition to reading from his work, Boss will preview his poetry film project, Motionpoems, which he co-founded with art director Angella Kassube. The goal is to broaden the audience for poetry by turning great contemporary poems into short films for online and big-screen distribution.

Boss’ poetry debut, Yellowrocket, was published in 2008 by W. W. Norton & Co. It received the Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Honor Award for Poetry in 2009 and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry in 2008.

Boss’ poems have appeared in The London Times, The New Yorker, Poetry and numerous other periodicals. Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser has featured Boss’ work in his newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.” Boss’ poems have also been nationally syndicated on public radio.

A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Boss was the 2008 winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry.

Boss describes his poetry as “musical and accessible.” He says it explores “the noxious nature of persistent love, the fickle character of a creator God, the artistry of nature’s disorder, the otherness of others, and the great nondenominational church of the past.”

Boss earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Alaska-Anchorage. A St. Paul resident, he received a bachelor’s degree at St. Olaf College.

Deep Song is a reading series that gives Northwestern students and local residents opportunities to listen to authors in many genres read from their published works and speak about their experiences in writing.