This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Poet Debra Kang Dean will read from her new book, Precipitates, 4:10-5:30 p.m. today in Interfaith Chapel, Hogg Hall.
Sponsored by the English department, the event is free and open to the public.
“With the precision of the minute hand and the broad, generous sweep of the hour, the poems in Precipitates are the result of a skilled and patient practitioner,” says award-winning poet Cathy Song. “Dean weaves quiet magic, fine poems.”
“Debra Kang Dean writes with disarming clarity and a formal beauty at once experimental and highly structured,” states award-wining poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming in her review of Precipitates. “Such are the quiet tensions of a meditative mind that knows Bashō’s wisdom: the poem must be both timeless and currentThis is a book of gorgeous faith in the power of image and I celebrate it.”
Dean’s poetry has been published in many journals and a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000), Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City (2000), and Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai’i (2003). She has published two other poetry collections: Back to Back (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1997), winner of the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition, judged by Ruth Stone; and News of Home (BOA 1998), co-winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Award.
Born in Honolulu of Korean and Okinawan ancestry, Dean enlisted in the Air Force after spending one semester at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She went on to receive a B.A. and M.A. from Eastern Washington University and an M.F.A. from University of Montana.
Dean teaches the taiji martial art, is on the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency program, and teaches online through the UCLA Extension School’s Writers’ Program. She lives in West Peterborough, N.H.