Max Seifert (Class of 2016) wins national poetry contest, has chapbook published

Friday, November 6, 2015

Seifert book coverMax Seifert, a senior English major at the University of Iowa, has had a chapbook of poems published as a result of his winning the 2015 National Federation of State Poetry Societies Florence Kahn Memorial Award.

The chapbook, titled The Hole of Everything, Nebraska, is available at www.amazon.com, which includes this description:

From a no-luck little league team, to a lonely embalmer, to a preteen girl and her bicycle, the characters that populate Max Seifert’s fictional Nebraska town are struggling to be something in the middle of nowhere. The Hole of Everything, Nebraska is a dream of the American Midwest and its open spaces—its parking lots and cornfields, its baseball diamonds, its slaughterhouses—sites of suffering and gritty miracles. Like the town it describes, Max Seifert’s poetry is at once familiar and other-worldly. We never lose the sense that we are strangers in this town, tourists to the unmonumental in modern America. These poems lead us “violently, by our necks, to life.”

Seifert, of Wilmette, Illinois, edits poetry for earthwords: the undergraduate review and interns for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in Ink Lit Mag and plain china: national anthology of undergraduate writing. earthwords and Ink Lit Mag are published by students working with the UI's Frank N. Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing, a program of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

The National Federation of State Poetry Societies is a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to recognize the importance of poetry with respect to national cultural heritage.

 


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.