Growing up, Jay Hopler was the funny dyslexic kid with a stutter, for whom reading was an ordeal and public speaking “nearly impossible.” But on Thursday, Feb. 27, no one could have guessed it as the award-winning poet took his place at the front of the full lecture hall. Sharing from his debut poetry collection, Green Squall, Hopler was genial, well-spoken and confident.

“I have a houseful of mean hunting dogs. I don’t get many visitors, but that’s okay,” he said. “One night one of the coonhounds emitted the strangest noise — I thought it was dying. When it calmed down, this poem came.”

He proceeded to read “The Howling of the Gods,” which reads: “We dreamt of panthers and hatpins, orchids and ashbins. / There was no moon; no moon was there / ever so magnificent. Even the dogs were mesmerized.”

Other selections from Green Squall, volume 100 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, stripped the speaker in the poem to his emotional core. “Firecracker Catalogue” contained an exuberant enumeration of colorfully-named firecrackers, while “The Frustrated Angel” politely reflected on “how often I’ve been mistaken for a shrub.”

Another poem pronounced solidly: “My days fly from me as though from a murderer. / Can you blame them? / Behind us, the house is empty and quiet as light.”

“My sister wouldn’t let my nephews read that one,” said Hopler.

Hopler is winner of the 2007 Great Lakes College Association New Writer Award for poetry. He was selected for the distinction from more than 40 collections that were in the running. To be eligible for the award, submissions must be the author’s first published volume. 

Faculty members of the GLCA’s 12 member colleges judged the contest. Oberlin Professor of Creative Writing Pamela Alexander sat on the panel that selected Green Squall. She and GLCA Director of Program Development Greg Wegner presented Hopler with his award after the reading.

“Tone is a weak word for how he sounds,” said Wegner. “Green Squall is very distinct, powerful, of primary colors.”

When asked how he feels about the poems in this volume since its acclaimed reception, Hopler noted a growing disconnect.

“They’ve taken on lives of their own — they don’t need me anymore. And I don’t have much to say to them. I’m done with those poems; it’s time for me to move on and do something better, more ambitious, more interesting.”

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1970, Hopler has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminar, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Purdue University. He is currently at work on a second collection of poetry as well as Roll Call of the Boneyard Heavies, a literary and cultural history of the American murder narrative.  He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Florida.

Hopler’s parting counsel for college students who aspire to be writers was, “Write all the time and always read more than you write.”