William Olsen

William Olsen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the birthplace of Weldon Kees and the deathplace of Redcloud.  He was raised in Park Forest, Illinois, a prototypical suburb that along with Levitown was the subject of William H.White's The Organization Man.  He is the author of four collections of poetry, The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988), Vision of a Storm Cloud (TriQuarterly, 1996), Trouble Lights (TriQuarterly, 2002), and Avenue of Vanishing (TriQuarterly, 2007). The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers was reissued  in 2003 as part of the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series.  He is co-editor, with Sharon Bryan, of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande, 2003). He is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Nation/Discovery Award, The Texas Institute of Arts Award, a Breadloaf Fellowship, and poetry awards from Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse.  His poems and essays have appeared in The New Republic, Chicago Review, Paris Review, Southern Review,  TriQuarterly, New American Poets of the Nineties, The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Poets of the New Century, and many other magazines and anthologies.   He teaches at Western Michigan University and the MFA Program at Vermont College.

Poems

Deer Traffic
from Trouble Lights

A Fallen Bat
from Poetry

By a Railroad Crossing
from The Southern Review

Avenue of Vanishing
TriQuarterly, 2007



Trouble Lights
TriQuarterly, 2002