Illinois Authors

David Bond

Born: in Pana, Illinois
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Bond is the Senior Library Specialist at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale. He was born and raised in Pana.

Biography: David Bond has worked at a variety of jobs such as assembly line worker, substitute teacher, newspaper reporter, and a long stretch of seventeen years at an underground coal mine, an environment that ignited his imagination into a poetic mode too long neglected. At age 44, when the mine finally closed, he entered the MFA program at SIU, studying with poets such as Rodney Jones, Lucia Perillo, and Allison Joseph. Much of his poetry is the poetry of labor, written not 'for poets alone, but for men.' David Bond has been a reader and taught classes at the Nimrod/Hardman Awards Conference at the University of Tulsa, the Binghamton University Poetry Conference, and the Around the Coyote Fall Arts Festival in Chicago, among other venues. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Black Dirt, Cape Rock, Farmer's Market, Karamu, Mobius, National Forum, Rhino, Sou'Wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Windless Orchard. His honors and prizes include the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and 2005.Along with the list of books David has published below, he also wrote a chapbook in 2012 titled ''The Light That Shatters Darkness: Poems From the Spartan Mine.''

• Different Works Illinois Arts Council Fellowship For Poetry, 2001, 2005 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award (For Individual Poems), 2003, 2004 MacDowell Artists Colony Fellowship, 2006

Primary Literary Genre(s): Poetry

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

E-Mail: dbond@lib.siu.edu

Selected Titles

American Chicken ISBN: 0595440738 OCLC: 173232208 iUniverse, Inc., Lincoln, Neb. : ©2007. Thirty years later, striding a hypotenuse/of bare earth between two sidewalks here/at the university, I can't explain the times;/Abbie Hoffman high jumps a velvet aisle/rope in federal court and Old Main/burns boundless in the night like/an ecstatic cult of images because/we did or did not love the Fatherland. From "American Chicken" Striking imagery and precise diction are characteristics of American Chicken, from the eloquence of the elegiac "Rend Lake at Sunset," a poetic reflection on the southern Illinois mining landscape where "hills of scoured coal smolder," to the tragi-comic nostalgia and regret inherent in the title poem as the narrator envies those who made the hard Vietnam choices, he feels he evaded. The poems in this very accessible book won for its author the Friends of Morris Library Delta Award, a regional prize presented to Bond "in recognition of his evocative poetry describing the blue-collar working man and the Midwest, giving the common man a unique place in the literature of southern Illinois."

Colors ISBN: 1588982572 OCLC: 48364781 Greatunpublished.com, [Charleston, S.C.] : ©2001. The poems of Colors reflect the hues of life, from a cousin's death to the mining of coal.