John LaPine

ESCANABA — Bay College will host a reading by Michigan poet John LaPine, at 2 p.m. Eastern time Thursday, Nov. 21, in the Bay College Library on the Escanaba Campus.

The poetry reading is free and open to the public, as well as students and staff at Bay College. This event is presented by the college’s creative writing class in conjunction with the Diversity Committee and the Bay College Library.

A graduate of Ishpeming High School, LaPine finished his undergraduate degree at Northern Michigan University and received his master’s in poetry from the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. He now teaches at Century College in White Bear Lake, Minn.

“While the U.P. comes up more in my essays, living in the Upper Peninsula comes into my poetry, too,” LaPine said. “But I’m not a ‘nature poet.’ I think I’d call myself a ‘social issues poet.'”

LaPine’s poetry explores many contemporary issues and themes. “One thing I’ve learned is that identity isn’t a singularity. I think we’re all trying to find which box we fit in, but I find that it’s boxes, not one single box. Like Prince’s song ‘Controversy.’ I’m definitely a black poet, but I’m a white poet, too,” LaPine said.

“My poetry is more about queerness, but race and blackness come up in my poems too,” LaPine continues. “I grew up in white culture in the U.P., so I grew up as ‘other.’ That shaped my writing a lot.”

“Poetry started, for me, as a place of fewer rules,” LaPine said. “I came to poetry by way of essay writing which has rules, grammar, structure. Plotting and order. Poetry was this place that I felt this sense of freedom. Poetry is almost like you put all the other rules in a blender and come up with a distillation. Almost like painting as an impressionist, putting colors or imagery together and then stepping back to see what it looks like.”

LaPine’s work has appeared in: The Rising Phoenix Review, Hot Metal Bridge, The /Temz/ Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Rhythm & Bones, Midwestern Gothic, Underblong, and more. His upcoming chapbook of essays, “An Unstable Container,” is being published by Bull City Press.

“We are really excited to be hosting this reading,” said Nanci Love, a Bay College instructor. “It’s the first time our creative writing class has hosted a writer since the class went exclusively online. Students learn a lot by working with published writers, and John’s poetry is current and topical — it’s about things they grapple with in their own lives.”

For more information, contact the Diversity Committee at diversity@baycollege.edu.