Steven Ford Brown - Influences and Creative Work

Influences and Creative Work

As he began his mature work his creative influences included Robert Bly, Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Diane Wakoski. "Deep image" poets such as Bly, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer and Wakoski had a particularly important impact on his poetry and creative outlook. His own published work since then has included essays, interviews, poetry and translations that have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Jacket (Australia), Verse and on the BBC Radio literary program The Verb He also edited One More River to Cross: The Selected Poems of John Beecher (introduction by Studs Terkel), and co-edited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry with David Rigsbee, which was selected as one of the "Best of the Best from the University Presses" and featured on C-SPAN's "Book TV". He served as Director of Research for the George Plimpton interview series, The Writer in Society, which appeared on the Channel 8 PBS affiliate in Houston, Texas, and featured interviews with Maya Angelou, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Bobbie Anne Mason. His own research for the series was on the short fiction and novels of Barthelme.