Mark Wacome Stevick oversees Gordon’s creative writing program and directs the Princemere Visiting Writers Series and the Five Ponds Creative Writing Festival. He writes fiction, essays and poetry, and makes films and documentaries. His poetry chapbook, Local Habitations, won the 2021 Wil Mills Award, and his collection, A Stadium Full of Bears, is forthcoming from Wipf and Stock. His interactive, history-based plays Cry Innocent and Goodnight, Captain White have been running in nearby Salem for decades. In Gordon’s Orvieto program, Professor Stevick frequently leads a month-long workshop on ekphrasis—poetry about artwork. On the Wenham campus, he mostly teaches writing workshops in several of the six genres offered. He also occasionally teaches courses on Nobel-prize-winning literature, public speaking, and badminton, and co-leads Gordon’s annual theatre seminar to London and Edinburgh, where he teaches a course called “Writing the City.”
Before joining the Gordon faculty full time, Professor Stevick had a mini-career in radio, writing commercials and hosting a Saturday morning kids’ show. Now he takes students to Boston to tell stories on The Moth. For seven years he was the front man for the poets-at-large at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Mark earned his Masters in creative writing at Boston University with Derek Walcott, Robert Pinsky, Geoffrey Hill, and Rosanna Warren.
Read some of Mark’s poetry, prose, and other assorted words on his website.
Here, Mark talks about great poems that become great hymns.
See some of Mark’s work with History Alive, Inc. (at bottom of page)
Mark and Andrew Manning jazz with drum and poem in Orvieto. Here is the poem:
Ars Creative Writing 