Max Garland, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, is the featured poet for the Dickinson Poetry Series on Wednesday, July 9 at 7 pm. Garland reveals this about the role of poetry: “To map the cities and towns and countryside of Wisconsin from space is one thing, but to creatively render life at ground level, down on the human scale, is the job of poetry.”

Garland is a former rural letter carrier and author of The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition, as well as a chapbook Apparition. His work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Best American Short Stories, and other journals and anthologies. He has received a NEA Fellowship for Poetry, Michener Fiction Fellowship, a Bush Literary Fellowship, the Tara Short Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board in both poetry and fiction. He lives and teaches in Eau Claire.