Wes Houp, First James Baker Hall Book Award Winner
“At Asbury, I studied poetry with Dr. Marcia Hurlow. She had a profound impact on me as a young poet and was so supportive. When she brought in James Baker Hall to workshop our poems, I knew I was in the presence of a real poet, a truly major dude! I had not seen Marcia in 30 years and tracked her down to read my manuscript. She couldn’t have been nicer to me.”
He graduated from Asbury and went to graduate school at Eastern Kentucky University. Like most of us, life happened, he married and had a family. Then fast forward, one day he was looking at Accents Publishing’s Facebook page and saw the announcement of the James Baker Hall Book Award and thought to himself, “I’ve got these poems . . . .”
When he sat down to go through the poems he had written over the last several years, some loose themes emerged. “Many of these poems came out of my daily commute through the countryside and state forest, so there’s quite a few that have to do with rural scenarios and nature. I mined certain features in the landscape–an old house where a grandmother lived with her granddaughter. A bus stop set amid a stand of cedar trees where children waited on dark winter mornings…”
“Before submitting for the award, very few people, if any, had read these poems,” Wes states. “To hear Greg Pape say those things about my work blew me away. It has been a little hard to comprehend at times that something so private will now be public,” Wes continued. ”When I was young and just starting to write, I set a goal of publishing a book when I was 25. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But winning this award has rejuvenated me. To see it finally happen has built my confidence as a poet.”
And what about the title, Strung Out Along the Endless Branch? “It is a line in one of the poems that just jumps out at me”, says Wes. “I think of a tree with endless branches constantly growing and stretching and sometimes that isn’t easy.”
We love the title, Wes, and can’t wait to celebrate with the release party in May.