A book of poems. Limited Collector's Edition, small pressrun
Paul J. Willis was born in 1955 and did most of his growing up in Corvallis, Oregon. In high school, he started climbing the nearby peaks of the Cascades, and a mythic version of these mountains became the soul of his first novel, No Clock in the Forest. A revised version of this novel, together with three sequels, has just been published as a single book, The Alpine Tales.
He first drafted No Clock in the Forest while pursuing his graduate degrees in English at Washington State University. He is now a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he teaches British Renaissance literature and creative writing.
During his years of teaching he gradually learned to write poetry, and now has two full-length collections, Visiting Home and Rosing from the Dead. His poems have been featured on Verse Daily and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and he was just selected as the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara for 2011-13. With his friend David Starkey he edited an anthology of American poems in response to Shakespeare, In a Fine Frenzy. (They were overwhelmed with submissions about Ophelia.)
The personal essay is also important to him, and he celebrated his fiftieth birthday with the publication of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild, chosen by ForeWord magazine as the best essay collection of 2005.
