Chris Brandt, finalist in Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize

Big congratulations to Fordham faculty member, Chris Brandt whose chapbook, The Place Where Grief Begins was a finalist in the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize contest sponsored by The New England Poetry Club.

Of the chapbook, Chris writes:

Barbara Vann was my friend and lover (though often we were antagonists), and the founding director of Medicine Show Theatre, of which I was a member. She was a theatrical genius. Then after a "complicated" relationship of 43 years, when she suddenly became old and died (of cancer) in the course of little more than two months in 2015 (she was only 77 and had just completed two seasons of brilliant work) I was completely blindsided by the depth of the grief I felt. The only thing that helped during the first two years of that intense feeling, was writing poems plumbing it, trying to reach the bottom of it. I never did, and I think I never will, though life in all its range and colors does go on.