Andrew Hudgins, 22nd Annual ODU Literary Festival

Andrew Hudgins is the author of five books of poetry and a book of essays. Presently a visiting professor of creative writing at The Johns Hopkins University, he has been the recipient of many prizes including the Thomas H. Carter Prize from Shenandoah for the best essay published in the magazine in 1998, the Frederick Bock Award from Poetry, and the Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1995. The Never-Ending (1991) was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award in Poetry. In 1998, he published Babylon in a Jar. The poems in Babylon in a Jar extend the forceful explorations that Andrew Hudgins began in his earlier work, particularly in Saints and Strangers, his first book and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. In this volume Hudgins\u27s poems revel in the either/or in life, reducing specific conflicts to the old, all-encompassing one between order and disorder. Ray Olson said in Booklist in 1998, Hudgins teases ponderable sensual and psychological pleasures out of such things as gardening and walking the dog and he calls Hudgins one of America\u27s most accessible, natural poets