William Billiter, director of foundation, corporate and government relations, has written a book of poetry titled Stutter (University of Georgia Press, April 1, 2011). Stutter was a winner in the 2010 National Poetry Series, an award program judged by distinguished national poets.
The publisher describes the book: “Billiter’s poems, spaced to stutter on the page, create a compelling yet dark world of small-town childhood that is disorienting and not all that bucolic. This collection pushes a recollected past to an extreme, replacing memory with myth and lacing narratives of disfigurement, accident, wildness, and murder with a strange enchantment.
“The town of Shinbone is an intense place: boys set bottles of cheap aftershave on fire, which segues with uncomfortable ease into grandmother’s killing axe dispatching chickens and Soup’s hand shredded in the corn dryer. Childhood here is no idyll, but rather the dreamlike entryway to the desires, doubts, and dismay of adulthood.”
Reviewer Hilda Raz, Luschei Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor of Prairie Schooner, writes “In William Billiter’s prize-winning book, Stutter, the voices seem to halt and syncopate. Yet readers never turn away from these voices, not once. . . . In Stutter, speech itself becomes subject, the pages' space and breadth giving language itself its holy stutter and magic. This book is truly divine. I loved it as all readers must."
Billiter holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
