LISTEN to my July 1, 2025 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring two poets of the West: Tim Hunt and Gerald Wagoner. Tim and Gerald will read from their work and discuss their journeys in poetry. Visit: Sharon Israel, Tim Hunt,Gerald Wagoner, Broadstone Books
Tim Hunt is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Western Where (Broadstone Books). Recognitions include the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award for his 2018 collection Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes, six Pushcart Prize Nominations, and the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Award for “Lake County Diamond” from his first collection Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press). His critical work includes two studies of Jack Kerouac (Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and The Textuality of Soulwork: Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose) and The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Originally from the hill country of northern California, he was educated at Cornell University and concluded his teaching career at Illinois State University where he was University Professor of English. He and his wife, Susan, live in Normal, IllinoiGerald Wagoner is the author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books,September 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, March 2023) . Gerald’s childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Montana where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. With a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, Gerald pursued the art of sculpture, and left the Northwest to study with Richard Stankiewicz. In 1982, after earning an MFA in sculpture, Gerald moved to Brooklyn, NY In New York Gerald exhibited regularly, then taught Art and English for the NYC Department of Education until 2017, at which time he choose to pursue the art of poetry. Selected Publications: Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Misfits, Maryland Literary Review, Burningword, The Umbrella Factory, Bangalore Review.
Praise for Tim Hunt and Gerald Wagoner
Tim Hunt’s elegy for a vanished America, Western Where, takes us on an evocative road trip where we discover the last picture show, a played-out silver mine, a hand-me-down fiddle, silver-screen cowboys, and more. His wistful word paintings leave us yearning.—Holly George-Warren, author of Janis: Her Life and Music & Public Cowboy #1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry
Gerald Wagoner is a poet of uncanny particulars: “The child, as man, remembers the tang and texture of warm / summer apricots picked from / a tree that was never there.” The poems in When Nothing Wild Remains are “on speaking terms with the wind,” rich in imagery of a rural America he knows intimately....Wagoner’s graphic poetry is cinematic and sobering in its frank depictions of what’s missing, the wildness of a remembered past as seen in the light of an ongoing present.—Elaine Sexton, author of Drive