Judson+Mitcham

JUDSON MITCHAM Mitcham was born in 1948 in Monroe. Mitcham was not formally trained as a writer. Instead he studied psychology at the University of Georgia, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He received his Ph.D. in 1974. From then he taught in the psychology department at FVSU. then, in ' 04 he retired from teaching at FVSU. He was also a professor of creative writing at the UGA and at Emory. He lives in Macon with his wife, Jean. They are the parents of two children. Mitcham's writing style is both poignant and powerful. MItcham's poetry is widely published around the world. It has appered in the Harper's, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. //Somewhere in Ecclesiastes// earned him the Devins Award and Georgia Author of the Year. His first novel, The Sweet Everlasting, won him the Townsend prise and a second Georgia Author of the Year award. Sabbath Creek, his second novel, also won the Townsend Prize. Somewhere in Ecclesiastes 1991 offers a moving sequence of poems, written throughout the 1980s, about youth, family, mortality, and the south. Most of the poems are first-person narratives. In "Night Ride 1965" Mitcham narrates the memory of sneaking out of the house at night and riding with a friend through the darkness. Below is a quote from the poem: we cruise all night down narrow country roads talking as though we could say it all, could tell what it means to grow quiet at the first light, while the stars all fail, what it means finally to turn home. Mitcham's novel The Sweet Everlasting offers an eloquent elegy for a vanished past. Narrated by Ellis Burt, who was a seventy-four-year-old ex-convict, the novel recounts the life of a sharecropers son in south Georgia. then got separated from her for decades by tragic circumstances that lie at the novel's heart. He tells how he comes to be reunited with his wife. Who has Alzheimer's disease and is unable to remember him. The Sweet Everlasting is not so much a southern novel as a book about a man attempting in old age to come to terms with his life, his mistakes, and the people he has known. At the same time, it takes a hard look at class conflict and racial prejudice in the rural South of the early twentieth century. He published Sabbath Creek in 2004 Which follows Charlene Pope and her son Lewis on a road trip through southern Georgia. It was described the book as a spare, lovely novel that is generous in humor yet anchored by sorrow. His poetry collection A Little Salvation was published in 2007. Poems Old and New, comprising forty new works as well as previously published poems. In both his novels and his poetry. His voice looks backwards with fondness And also his discernment on a personal and regional past slipping rapidly beyond reach.

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