Sam Campbell
Sam Campbell was born and raised in Cary, Illinois. He attended Concordia University, St. Paul on a football scholarship where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with creative writing emphasis. In St. Paul, Sam was introduced to the vibrant Twin Cities literary scene, attending poetry readings, slams, and open mics. It was here he saw a marginalized genre thrust into the spotlight and bring together an eclectic community through the power of language; he knew he wanted to be a writer and surround his life with poetry.
Next, Sam entertained a brief professional football career, playing one season for the Cottbus Crayfish in the German Football League. After his time abroad, he moved to the Rocky Mountains working as a ski lift attendant and freelance journalist. This experience landed him a job at a daily newspaper in Montana before he entered the MFA program in creative writing at Boise State University. As a teaching assistant at BSU, Sam studied theories of literary criticism, lyric poetry, and rhetoric and composition. Since then, he has taught composition and literature courses at Truckee Meadows Community College; University of Nevada, Reno; Western Nevada College; Sierra Nevada University; Lake Tahoe Community College; and Prince William Sound College.
A Best of the Net nominee, Sam is author of the poetry chapbook Echoed (MoonPath Press). His work appears or is forthcoming in Lindenwood Review, El Portal, Harpur Palate, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, Hoxie Gorge Review, and Poetry City, USA, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Prince William Sound College, in Valdez, Alaska.
Poem from Echoed
Last year’s calendar
Today is today minus one. In this subtraction, last year’s calendar is a utility of neglect. In this subtraction, I live facing my past with it still behind me. In each day, growth. In each growth, groves— landscapes to measure reflection. A river stares like a grid compartmentalizing light & its absence. Of which I ask Have you kept a journal? & the river recites from its diary without breaking eye contact. In our gaze is the idea of a mountain thinking of how to erode, to disperse across the across it surveys— terrain littered with the essence of trying to find a tomorrow worth dying in.
