Richard Hague
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Richard Hague (b. 1947) is an American poet and writer.
Born August 7, he was raised in Steubenville, Ohio, in Appalachian Ohio's Steel Valley, where he worked summers for Wheeling Steel and the Penn Central Railroad. He studied as a high school student at Northwestern University's Summer High School Journalism Institute and as an adult in Oxford, England on a six-week NEH Seminar. His BS and MA degrees in English are from Xavier University in Cincinnati. He continues to teach writing to adults and young people in Cincinnati. He is former Chair of the English Department at Purcell Marian High School where the Writing Program he designed and administered won the National First Prize in The English-Speaking Union's "Excellence in English Award" in 1994.
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[edit] Career
He has taught at Purcell and Purcell Marian since 1969, starting up the interdisciplinary Course of the River. He organized and taught the first creative writing course; his students have won First Place in all of the most prestigious Ohio writing contests, including twice winning the Lucille Loy Kuck Ohioana Award for Excellence in English, sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohioana Library Association. They have also won the Ohio High School Poetry Contest sponsored by Ohio Northern University, the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Scholarship at Kent State University, and the Anne Tansey Poetry Award, as well as an Ohio Arts Council High School Scholarship in Poetry. He and his students have been invited to read in the Poetry In the Park series in Columbus, Ohio, and those students have gone on to work as Assistant Editor of Writer's Digest and as Fiction editor of Limestone, the literary magazine of the University of Kentucky. In 2004 and 2005, Hague helped organize and served on panels in both Cincinnati Writer Days, sponsored by InkTank, a writing organization dedicated to enabling the voices of those traditionally unheard in urban society, partnered by the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. He also helped organize the first Slam U Poetry Slam and Contest, sponsored by Raymond Walters College and St. Ursula Academy in Cincinnati. He has brought students for a decade to all the poetry reading venues in Cincinnati; his students were invited to read in the prestigious York Street Cafe readings in Newport, Kentucky.
[edit] Writing Life
His own life as a writer has been busy as well. He was the 1982 Cincinnati Post-Corbett Award winner in Literary Arts. He has been a member of the staff of the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, most recently in 2004, The Augusta Writer's Roundtable in Augusta, Kentucky, the Midwest Writers Conference at[Kent State University, The Highlands Summer Conference at Radford University in Virginia and was Literary Artist for the 1984 Kentucky Institute For Arts in Education at the University of Louisville. He was a Scholar in Creative Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and a Finalist in the Associated Writing Programs' Award in Creative Nonfiction. He is Editor Emeritus of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, an annual anthology of contemporary Appalachian writing. He will be teaching two graduate institutes, including "Teaching Poetry Writing To Adolescents," in the Department of Education at Northeastern University in Boston in the summer of 2006.
[edit] Publications
His collections of poems include Ripening (The Ohio State University Press, 1984) for which he was named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year in 1985), Possible Debris (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1988), Mill and Smoke Marrow, appearing in the four-book collection A Red Shadow Of Steel Mills (Bottom Dog Press, 1991), Garden (Word Press 2002), Alive In Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press, 2003) and named 2004 Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association, The Time It Takes Light (Word Press, 2004), and Lives of The Poem (Wind Publications, 2005), as well as five chapbooks, Crossings, A Week Of Nights Down River, A Bestiary, Greatest Hits: 1968-2000, and Burst: Poems Quickly (Dos Madres Press, 2004). Milltown Natural: Essays And Stories from A Life (Bottom Dog Press, 1997) was a 1997 National Book Award nominee.
[edit] Credits
His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Poetry, Country Journal, Creative Nonfiction, Birmingham Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Nimrod, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Now & Then, Negative Capability, Ohio Magazine, English Journal, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Religion & Ethics Newsletter, Basic Education, and Teachers & Writers as well as two dozen other magazines and reviews and in over two dozen anthologies, including A Southern Appalachian Reader (Appalachian Consortium Press), Old Wounds, New Words, (The Jesse Stuart Foundation), Learning By Heart: Contemporary American Poetry About School, University of Iowa Press, 1999) Essential Love: Poems About Mothers And Fathers, Daughters And Sons (Poetworks/Grayson Press, 2000), in Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhoods (Beacon Press 2001), in Pass/Fail (Kleidon Press, 2002), I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2003) and O Taste And See: Food Poems, (Bottom Dog Press, 2004). He is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The Greater Cincinnati Foundation, The Council for Basic Education, The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Marianist Education Consortium, and three Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowships in two genres. He won the $1,000 First Prize in the year 2000's Sow's Ear Poetry Review contest, and was, for the second time, a Finalist in the 1999 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, sponsored by Nimrod: International Journal. He is winner of the James Still Short Fiction Award for 2004, sponsored by Wind: A Journal of Writing & Community, and judged by novelist and short story writer Lee Smith (Oral History, Fair And Tender Ladies, The Last Girls). Smith writes of Hague's "Fivethree Filson and the Looking Business." This is a wildly original story in the great American tradition of the tall tale, by a writer who's clearly punch-drunk on language. Dickensian in scope, this exuberant story is both literary and wildly entertaining."
[edit] Awards
Richard Hague was twice named Master Teacher by the Faculty at Purcell Marian High school and was the 2003 Teacher of the Year as voted by the Senior Class. He has presented professionally at the National Council of Teachers of English, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts, and the Ohio Catholic Education Association.
He lives in Cincinnati's Madisonville neighborhood with his wife Pam Korte, a potter and Assistant Professor of Ceramics at The College of Mt. St. Joseph, and his two sons, Patrick, a student at Indiana University, and Brendan, a graduate of Purcell Marian High School.
More information on Richard Hague is available at the Southern Appalachian Writers Coop site at http://www.sawc.us
