Celebrate National Poetry Month with prize-winning poet Peter Schmitt in a Zoom webinar. In Goodbye, Apostrophe, his first new collection in more than a decade, the nationally recognized and prize-winning poet has assembled nearly 50 poems exemplary for their range and emotional power. From the hard lessons of childhood to the loss of parents, these poems confront the challenging issues of our time, including race, religion, abuse of varying kinds, and reflexive political correctness. By turns poignant and funny, elegiac and celebratory, formal and free, the mature work of a poet Richard Wilbur hailed as “one of the strongest talents in his generation” will resonate indelibly with any serious reader of American poetry.

Peter Schmitt is the author of six collections of poems: Goodbye, Apostrophe (Regal House Publishing, 2020), Renewing the Vows (David Robert Books), Hazard Duty, and Country Airport (Copper Beech Press), and two chapbooks, Incident in an Apartment Complex: A Suite of Voices, and To Disappear (Pudding House). He has received the Lavan Award from The Academy of American Poets (selected by Richard Wilbur), the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize (judged by Anthony Hecht, Mary Jo Salter, and Nicholas Christopher), the Julia Peterkin Award (Converse College) and is twice a recipient of grants from the Florida Arts Council. He was awarded an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship. His poems have been featured on NPR’s Writers Almanac, and he is a winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival open competition. His work has appeared in many leading publications, including The Hudson Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review, and been widely anthologized. He has reviewed poetry and fiction for the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and worked as a freelance editor of novels, short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalism. He is currently editing his late father’s WWII remembrance, Ferry Tales: A Navigator’s Memoir (McFarland, 2022).

A native Miamian and honors graduate of Amherst College, Schmitt studied with Richard Wilbur and received the College’s poetry prizes as a junior and senior. He attended the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where his teachers included Donald Justice. He has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Miami since 1986.