Poets’ union: husband and wife featured at Writers’ Fest

Two poets proved they could keep college students entertained when they opened the North Lake College Writers’ Fest on March 29.

Sherry and Jerry Craven, the poetic husband and wife duo, read their favorite writings to a receptive audience in the campus library.

Our own thing
“I could go into how to write poetry,” said Sherry Craven as she began her seminar, “but it doesn’t do us a whole lot of good anyway. We’re going to do our own thing.”

She told her audience not to worry about trying to figure out what it means, because a writer will determine meaning later, after a piece is completed.

Sherry Craven said that things should be called what they are, using their proper names. She reminisced about a time when “macaroni was macaroni, and not pasta.” At a restaurant, when she received a sandwich on plain white bread. She asked, “Where’d you get this? A museum?”

As part of her presentation, she read a poem about a moth that was trapped between two panes of glass. The poem captured the essence of the grief that she felt for her mother’s death. “When mother died, she was as surprised as I was,” she wrote.

Sherry Craven has taught and written in both English and Spanish for more than 20 years. In 2005, she received the Conference of College Teachers of English poetry award.

Author and educator
Jerry Craven has published more than 20 books including the novel Snake Mountain, which he read from during his presentation. He is a professor of English at West Texas A&M and an editor for multiple magazines including, New Texas and Amarillo Bay.

Since graduating Jerry has taught at numerous colleges including, Institut Teknologi MARA, a school in Malaysia, and The American University of Baku, located in Azerbaijan.

He also has a book, Tilting Cows, which he wanted to title “Tickling Catfish.”

As a professor at West Texas A&M University, Craven said that his job as a professor is to “inoculate students against poetry” because a student’s father had said they need to learn about poetry like they need to know other disgusting endeavors of human life.

— Staff writer Judy Faue also contributed to this story.