Nathan Brown (poet)
| Nathan Brown | |
|---|---|
 Brown in 2013 | |
| Occupation | Poet, Author, Singer-Songwriter |
| Notable awards | 2009 Oklahoma Book Award |
| Website | |
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www | |
Nathan Brown is an author, singer-songwriter, and award-winning poet who served as the Oklahoma Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2014. He now hails from Wimberley, Texas, a small town in the Hill Country, just outside Austin.
Though born in Longview, Texas, in 1965, his family moved to Norman, Oklahoma, in January 1970, where he grew up and lived most of his life. He has always considered Norman his hometown, and Oklahoma his home state.
Brown's main artistic focus is, and has long been, poetry. However, from his early teens to his late twenties, songwriting and music performance were what he was known for. As a musician, he has performed at the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the famous Bluebird Café in Nashville, as well as other well known venues like the Mucky Duck in Houston, the Cactus Cafe in Austin, and the Blue Door in Oklahoma City. He's also performed onstage at Sultan's Pool, just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
However, after a stint as a professional songwriter in Nashville, in the late 1980s and early 90s, he burned out. He appreciated the town, but says that the music machine, as an industry, destroyed his love for music pretty quickly. He left Nashville and came back home where he enrolled in a creative writing course at the University of Oklahoma. This is when a spark from a favorite professor, George Economou, lit the fire of poetry in Brown.
As a poet, he's performed in venues from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association on Long Island to the Sisters Folk Festival out west, and from the Everwood Farmstead in Wisconsin down to the Taos Poetry Festival in New Mexico and the Austin International Poetry Festival in Texas.
Published books
- My Salvaged Heart: Story of a Cautious Courtship (2016)
- To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words (2015)
- Oklahoma Poems, and Their Poets (2014)
- Less Is More, More or Less (2013)
- Karma Crisis:New and Selected Poems (2012)
- Letters to the One-Armed Poet: A Memoir of Friendship, Loss, and Butternut Squash Ravioli (2011)
- My Sideways Heart (2010)
- Two Tables Over (2008)
- Not Exactly Job (2007)
- Ashes over the Southwest (2005)
- Suffer the Little Voices (2005)
- Hobson's Choice (2002)
Discography
- Gypsy Moon
- Driftin' Away
- Fall
- What does this have to do with anything?
- The Why in the Road
References
- Giving Poetry Another Chance (This Land Press)