Novelist & Poet
Poets speak not just to their own struggle but to all of us. As long as there is poetry, then we shall in some way—all of us—be heard. Poetry is its own democracy, a country that has no divisions, no boundaries, that reaches across time and across culture and language, to each of us and demands that each of our voices be heard.
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of three novels, The River Crossed (2024), The Deception of the Thrush, and memoir No Way Back: A Young Man’s Search for Home (2026). He has also published six books of poems, including Twist (2025), All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, To the Promised Land Grocery, and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press), along with several anthologies and chapbooks. His new book of letters with his friend Peter Orne, Dear Teen, Dear Poet: A Coming of Age in Letters, is scheduled for release in 2026. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine and staff Writer for the Asheville Poetry Review. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Café Review, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC, with his husband Myles Rightmire and their three dogs, five fish, and twenty birds.
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