John hodgen biography

Bread without Sorrow, JOHN HODGEN's second volume of poetry, earned him the Balcones Poetry Prize in 2002.
John Hodgen is married, with two daughters.
He is the author of three previous books of poetry: In My Father's House, winner of the Bluestem Award; Bread Without Sorrow, winner of the Balcones Poetry.

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A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Witness”

“Witness” grew out of a trip to New Orleans a year after Katrina. A good place for poets. There was that extra element in everything that happened, something alive and conflicted in every gesture and smell and sound, that cultural crossroad resonating with the reverberations of deep tragedy and that need to heal and find how to move on. Each busker, preacher and street dancer seemed aware that death was still in the air, as it always is, lingering somehow. Each song was a little more needed, each drink tasted just a bit better, and each word seemed a little more desperate and necessary.

The moment was just what it was, a bright, angry college kid suddenly erupting at a preacher in the French Quarter, just snapping, unable to contain himself, seeing in the man with the bullhorn a target for all his wrath. It seemed to occur in slow motion, a boozy explosion that might have gone unseen at first, yet filled with that sudden rippling violence as his friends dove in to pull him away. It was all there, the street a tableau, a modern morality

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John Hodgen lives in Shrewbury, MA, holds a Masters Degree in English from Assumption College, and teaches at Mount Wachusett Community College and the Worcester Art Museum. He is the author of In My Fathers House (winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas) and Bread Without Sorrow (2002, Lynx House Press / Christopher Howell, 420 West 24th St., Spokane, WA 99203, ISBN# 0-89924-112-3.)
He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for Poetry, first prize in the Red Brick Review poetry competition, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in Poetry in 2000. Several of his poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and he was one of five finalists in the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Program. He was a finalist in Houghton Mifflins New Poetry Series, Cleveland State Universitys Poetry Center Prize, Carnegie Mellon Universitys Poetry Series, and Northeastern Universitys Samuel French Morse Poetry Award.

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John Thomson Hodgen (1826-1882) was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky. He attended Bethany College in West Virginia and studied at the medical department of the University of Missouri (later Missouri Medical College). After graduating from medical school in 1848, he served as Assistant Resident Physician of St. Louis City Hospital for a year. Dr. Hodgen then practiced with Dr. Joseph N. McDowell in St. Louis. He joined the faculty of Missouri Medical College, serving as Demonstrator of Anatomy (1849-1853), Chair of Anatomy (1854-1862), and Chair of Physiology (1858-1862).

During the Civil War, Dr. Hodgen was appointed to the rank of Surgeon General of the State of Missouri in 1862. When Dr. McDowell sided with the Confederacy, Dr. Hodgen transferred his allegiance to the St. Louis Medical College where he served as the Chair of Physiology (1862-1868) and Dean of the College (1865-1882). In addition to his administrative duties at the St. Louis Medical College, Dr. Hodgen also taught clinical surgery at City Hospital from 1864-1882 and was a surgeon at St. Luke's Hospital.

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