the middle school, high school, and college levels, including a stint as Headmaster of The Patterson School. Most of his creative and critical work has been completed while living in Hickory, North Carolina, and teaching at Lenoir Rhyne University and Catawba Valley Community College where, in 2013, he was recognized with the "Adjunct Excellence in Teaching Award." Writing Awards Owens's book, Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming was nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award. His poems have been nominated for eleven Pushcart Prizes and seven Best of the Net Awards, and received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Next Generation Indie Awards, and the North Carolina Writer's Network. His poem, "So Norman Died of Course,"received a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize Anthology for 2009 and "On the Days I Am Not My Father," "Cleaning House," "The Arrival of the Past," and "Rails" were featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. His more than 1400 published poems have appeared in a diverse range of journals, including Georgia Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cream City Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Cottonwood, among others. More than 100 of his essays and reviews have appeared in Main Street Rag, The Pilot, Pirene's Fountain, and many others. He has spoken about poetry or shared his work on NPR, Tedx, several radio shows and podcasts, and at more than 200 public readings at universities, libraries, and conferences. His essays on poetry have appeared multiple times in Poets Market. Owens' papers are housed in the South Carolina Poetry Archives in the James B Duke Library at Furman University. Themes Owens' poems treat a wide range of themes often expressed as dialectics, including faith and agnosticism, abuse and parenting, alienation and existentialism, loneliness and collaboration, entrapment and liberation, personal relationships and self-sufficiency, nightmares and reality, the disappearance of a rural American South characterized as both pastoral and violent, and the possibilities of redemption as his characters attempt to make sense of an often seemingly senseless world. His settings and imagery are familiar but often quirky, utilizing extended metaphors and juxtaposing the mundane with the transcendent in sometimes disturbing ways. His work is marked by diversity in tone, style and subject matter, at times nearly formal, at other times conversational and performance-based; at