Nathan Brown is an author, singer-songwriter, and award-winning poet who served as the Oklahoma Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2014.[1][2][3][4]
Life
Nathan Brown was born in Longview, Texas[5] on March 16, 1965.[6] His family moved to Norman, Oklahoma in January 1970, where he grew up and went to college. He was a professional musician in Nashville, Tennessee in his 20s and 30s.[7] He now hails from Wimberley,[8] a small town in the Hill Country of Texas where he has lived with his wife, Ashley, since 2013.
Nathan holds an interdisciplinary PhD in English and Journalism[9] with an emphasis in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Oklahoma.[10][2] After teaching at OU for almost twenty years, he returned to the Austin area to be closer to the music scene there and tours the country full-time as a poet, musician, and workshop leader.[11] He has published 20 books, one of which (Two Tables Over) won the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry,[8][1] and another, Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize in New Jersey.[8][12] He is the founder of Mezcalita Press.[6]
Brown has performed at numerous events including the Wordfest at the Waco Arts Cultural Fest,[11] the Taos Poetry Festival,[9] and the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival.[13] Brown has taught many writing workshops, including writing family stories at the Moore Library,[14] the Writers Workshop at Norman Public Library,[15] and ekphrastic poetry at the Fred Jones Museum of Art,[16] He was an artist-in-residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.[11] He also began as the instructor for the Descanso Creatives intensive workshop series in 2018. The workshops are a "deep-dive" and culturally-immersive writing experience. Beginning in Tuscany, Italy, future workshops are planned for Ireland (2019) and France (2020).
