Dynamite: Anders Carlson-Wee and Poetry's Explosive Potential

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Anders Carlson-Wee was a professional rollerblader before he studied wilderness survival and started hopping freight trains to see the country. He has bicycled across the United States twice, hitchhiked to the Yukon and back, and walked on foot across Croatia and Bosnia through the farm villages of the Dinaric Alps. On January 11, the award-winning contemporary poet and filmmaker visits high school students and senior residents at the Boys and Girls Club of the Souhegan Valley in Milford, thanks to a New Hampshire Humanities Community Project Quick Grant. Carlson-Wee will screen his poetry film Riding the High Line, read poems,engage in an interactive interview with Milford High School students, and lead a short writing exercise. Author and celebrated UNH writing professor emeritus Thomas Newkirk will introduce Carlson-Wee and facilitate the student interview.

North Dakota-born Carlson-Wee is the winner of Ninth Letter’s 2014 Poetry Award, New Delta Review’s 2014 Editors’ Choice Prize, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Missouri Review, West Branch, Blackbird, The Journal, Linebreak, Best New Poets 2012 and 2014, and elsewhere. With his brother Kai Carlson-Wee, he co-directed the award-winning poetry film, Riding the Highline. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Anders is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University and is the author of The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019).

Event details 

Click the image below to watch the trailer of the film, Riding the Highline.