Poet Tim Conroy
As a prologue to the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival on October 26-29, the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center is honored to host a free public drop-in launch event for poet Tim Conroy’s second book, No True Route. Join us on Wednesday, October 25, from 5-7pm at 601 Bladen St., in downtown Beaufort. No advance registration required. Books will be available for sale and signing. Refreshments will be provided. Conroy will read from his new book of poetry at 5:30 p.m.
ABOUT NO TRUE ROUTE
“The title of Tim Conroy’s second book, No True Route, asks us to think about journeys in both time and space. And, for sure, there are poems throughout the book taking up the themes of movement, direction, detour, destination. These are poems by a man looking back over his life—those landscapes of time and family and loss—and thinking about how he got here. What were the signposts? Where could his life have taken another direction? What then? Who would he have been? Not this man, certainly. Another, perhaps harder, or lost, and not a writer. Don’t we all think about the choices we made or failed to make, the inheritances we rejected and those we kept, like a mother’s jar of seashells on a bookshelf, a slight thing, a thing weighted with memory, and inevitabilities?
“Yet, I’m struck by a theme of sustenance that threads the book—a mother packing her children’s lunches, a joke between spouses about a soup of nothing, coastal meals of crab and shrimp, a bag of chips that rivets a dog’s attention. Or dreams that will be eaten. Rainwater in chalices. Surely that is another way to think about our lives: the things and people that have sustained us, fed us, kept us going. And surely that is another way to think about poetry like this. Something to chew on. Something that can keep us going. Words that sustain.” – Ed Madden, former Poet Laureate of Columbia, S.C., from the preface
Author of the collections A Theology of Terrain and No True Route (forthcoming in October), Tim Conroy is a poet and former educator. His work has appeared in Fall Lines, Jasper Magazine, Marked by the Water, Sheltered, Twelve Mile Review, Poetry on the Comet, The Post and Courier, Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth, and Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy. In 2022, he received the Broad River Prize for prose from Fall Lines, Volume IX. A founding board member of the Pat Conroy Literary Center established in his brother’s honor, Tim, and his wife Terrye, live in Dunedin, Florida.
Learn more about the Pat Conroy Literary Center—and the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival—at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
