Local Poets to Address Missouri State Poetry Society

The Missouri State Poetry Society’s (MSPS’s) annual convention will be held this Friday and Saturday, September 19 and 20, at the Lebanon, MO, Second Baptist Church, in the Rec Hall. MSPS is looking forward to welcoming Southwest Missouri native, Dr. Phillip Howerton. Quoting from his bibliography, “Phillip Howerton was brought up on a dairy farm…near where his ancestors settled in the 1830s.” He tried his hand at a variety of jobs before going back to school to earn his degrees “in English, history and education from Drury University and a doctorate in American Literature and Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Missouri-Columbia.” Besides teaching at colleges and universities in the Ozarks, he is co-founder and co-editor of Cave Region Review and has been published in several books, magazines and journals. “The University of Arkansas Press released his anthology, The Literature of the Ozarks, in 2019, a project for which he received the 2019 Missouri Literary Award from the Missouri Library Association.”