PHOTO BY BECKI RUTTA
CRAIG BEAVEN
Craig Beaven’s collections of poetry are Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, winner of the 2021 Anhinga Prize, Natural History (Gerald Cable Book Award, 2019) and Teaching English Lit on the Day After a Shooting (CutBank Chapbook Prize, 2022). He is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Carolina Quarterly, Hollins Critic, Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, the Best New Poets anthology, and many others. A Kentucky native, Beaven earned an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and a PhD from the University of Houston. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
In Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, Craig Beaven takes the reader on a heartfelt journey through the current American political landscape. The long title poem uses teaching—in a world to familiar with classroom gun violence—to meditate on love, race, language, and terror. A second sequence makes those fears personal and individual, and the third traces these topics to the deep historical past. Throughout, Beaven asks questions about the idea of terror in a world where dread and violence are perpetrated by the government, police officers, students, and neighbors hiding behind social media aliases. In poems narrative and complex, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You examines our present, often chaotic world, with rich and powerful language.