Shoreline

Shoreline is Rhode Island College’s Magazine of the Arts
We meet Mondays from 4:00pm to 6:50pm in Craig-Lee 206.

Open positions include Art Editor, Business Manager, and Assistant Editor.

Submission Guidelines 2008-2009

• Submissions are due Friday, November 21, 2008
• Please follow the guidelines carefully to ensure that each submission can be judged anonymously.
• Send your piece to ric.shoreline@gmail.com.
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Rhode Island College Alumnus Publishes Second Book of Poetry

Thursday, November 6 at 7:30 p.m. in the college’s Student Union, room 307
Gary J. Whitehead reading and book signing of Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps

Gary J. Whitehead recently published his second full-length collection of poems, Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps. Whitehead has previously authored The Velocity of Dust, Salmon Publishing/Dufour Editons, as well as three chapbooks of poetry, two of which were winners of national competitions.

The bulk of the poems in Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps were written while Whitehead was on a teaching sabbatical and in residence at a remote cabin in the wilderness of southwestern Oregon, thanks to an award from PEN Northwest. During this residency, he lived off the electricity grid, two hours from the nearest town, his only companion his dog, Gus. Whitehead says, “At this time I was going through a divorce and had sold my house in New York and moved all of my things into storage. A good friend was dying of cancer and calling me regularly on the cabin’s radio telephone. Midway through the residency, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, too. With no newspapers and a radio I was loath to listen to, I was virtually cut off from news, and I had no idea that in July terrorists had bombed London's transit system or that in August Hurricane Katrina had struck—until my ex-wife called me on the radio phone and gave me the news. Hence, the title of the book. During the deluge, I was off building poems in my own little world, measure by measure, line by line, oblivious to the world’s tragedies. So, the poems in this collection deal with divorce, solitude, illness, death, terrorism, natural disaster and the guilt of inaction. But, arising out of a remote utopia, they deal, too, with nature’s beauty and with hope found in the small occurrences of domestic economy.”

Whitehead earned two degrees from Rhode Island College, a B.A. in English in 1990 and an M.A.T. in English in 1992. He has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship in Creative Writing at Iowa State University (where he earned an M.A. in English), and the PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Award. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife and dog and teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.

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