Jeffery BeamJeffery Beam is a poet whose work, hailed for its "transcendent, lush beauty, its minimal sacrament, simplicity and physicality," fuses the physical and spiritual worlds, creating a conversation between the natural world, the body, and the spirit. Heis the author of more than twenty-five books, including Verdant (Kin Press, 2022), The New Beautiful Tendons (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), and Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon Society, 1995). His CD multimedia collection, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems, won an Audio Publishers Award. Collaborations with visual artists, composers, and musicians are an important characteristic of his work, and these have taken him to Carnegie Hall, Italy, and Wales. These partnerships include Spectral Pegasus with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, illustrated by Ippy Patterson, which was honored with the American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books/50 Covers award and designated one of ten "Outstanding Books of the Year" in 2000 by the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYS). Musical works inspired by his poems have also been performed across Europe and North America, and Troubadour: Collaborations & Inventions in Music 1971-2023 was published in conjunction with a Mallarmé Music concert, celebrating Beam's seventieth birthday and the composers who have set his poems to music. Ceramicist Judith Ernst's two large vessels carved with his poems are now in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina and Blowing Rock Art & History Museum in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
Beam, a retired botanical librarian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the Poetry Editor Emeritus of Oyster Boy Review. At UNC-Chapel Hill, he received awards for public service and preservation, including being named the campus's Lorax for his efforts in preserving its historic landscape and trees. UNC-Chapel Hill's Special Collections holds his archive, with smaller collections at the ONE Library in Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale's Stonewall National Museum. His Website is www.jefferybeam.com. Read More Read Less