Authors of Union: The Poems of Peter Caccavari

Channel U: Union Institute and University

Welcome to Authors of Union. Today, we are going to talk with Dr. Pete Caccavari, who has written his first chapbook of poetry, Minor Loss of Fidelity, shipping soon from Finishing Line Press. The book depicts people reacting to their environment – whether natural or human-made – and their struggles to make sense of those encounters. Caccavari's poems chronicle a variety of losses, but also a variety of hard-won gains. These encounters with the environment are mirrored in encounters of content with poetic forms. Personal history, natural history, and poetic history undergird the present, and these gird the present for the future. (Source: Finishing Line Press)

Caccavari wears two hats. By day, he is the Associate Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness and Title IX Coordinator for Union Institute & University. His job requires compliance and attention to detail. “I enjoy that job very much – it’s where I can satisfy my desire for order." By night, his creative side emerges. “Poetry, on the other hand, lets me color outside the lines and break the rules.”

Caccavari earned his bachelor of arts in English from Xavier University and his M.A. Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University. He lives in Cincinnati and credits the beauty of the landscape and city as inspiration.

The host for the interview-style podcast is Dr. Linwood Rumney, professor in Union’s General Education Program, poet, and author. He is the winner of the 17th Annual Gival Press Poetry Award for Abandoned Earth. Rumney's poems and nonfiction essays have appeared in many publications including the North American Review and Crab Orchard Review. His translations of Aloysius Bertrand, an early practitioner of the modern prose poem in French, have appeared in Arts & Letters and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Rumney recently completed his Ph.D. as a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellow at the University of Cincinnati.