Patrick Hicks – författare

An anthology of essays and poetry offering a unique take on the South Dakota town residents call “the Best Little City in America”.

In 1992, Money magazine named Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the best place to live in America. This rich anthology offers an inside look at the city through the eyes of both longtime residents and recent transplants. In over forty-five essays, you’ll hear stories about the city’s past, including the region’s legacy of violence against Native Americans and Sioux Falls’s status as a “divorce destination” in the late 1800s. But you’ll also discover the ways the city’s savvy planning and entrepreneurial gumption have helped it navigate twenty-first-century challenges.

You’ll read about:

·       the end of George McGovern’s presidential run at a Sioux Falls Holiday Inn

·       the vibrant Jewish and Syrian-Muslim communities that helped form the city

·       the first sit-down strike in American labor history

·       firsthand accounts of how South Sudanese refugees are shaping the city today

·       And more

Edited by Patrick Hicks and Jon K. Lauck, City of Hustle: A Sioux Falls Anthology gives an insider’s perspective on what’s really going on in so-called “flyover country,” and it shows why that name misses so much of the true richness that makes up life there every day.

In several versions of ancient mythology, the spider is the creator of the universe, a weaver of reality, a goddess that has built an intricate web to support the story of life. In this collection, Patrick Hicks explores how we are born into history, how we spin our stories and struggle against failure, and also how throwaway moments can shimmer with unexpected beauty. Our lives and the lives of the dead are threaded together, they form an intricate pattern of love, loss, ancestry, and home. By teasing out these delicate intersections, Hicks explores how we are connected to the world around us."These finely wrought lyrics are focused on the family—in Ireland, Canada, the United States, and in-transit—to reveal origins, maps, anxieties, and coincidences. Hicks recovers from time desires, loves, and the moist mother tongues of the dispersed. Hicks searches through literary history for those he seeks to follow—W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Brian Moore in particular. This is a singularly impressive first collection—allusive, engaging, exciting."Eamonn Wall"The poems of Patrick Hicks brim with the confluence of Irish, American, and personal history."Daniel TobinPatrick Hicks is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, as well as Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College. His work has appeared in scores of international publications. He is the author of Travelling Through History (2005), Draglines (2006), and The Kiss that Saved My Life (2007). Several poems from Finding The Gossamer have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and winning a variety of grants to support his work, he has lived in Northern Ireland, England, Germany, and Spain. He currently lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he enjoys thunderstorms rolling across the prairie.

Two thousand years ago a tiny village was founded on the marshy banks of the River Thames. Since then, this outpost of a crumbling Roman Empire has become an international city, a magnetic intersection between cultures and histories. London was once the capital for millions of colonized people around the globe, including—for nearly 200 years—a land that would eventually become the United States. For good or bad, our tongues move with words and ideas that bubbled up from this mighty city. In this new collection, Patrick Hicks explores connections between history and place, colonialism and language, visiting and belonging, and he points out the hidden streets and personalities of a city that changed the world.Patrick Hicks is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, as well as Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Finding the Gossamer (Salmon, 2008), and his work has appeared in scores of journals such as Ploughshares, Tar River Poetry, Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Indiana Review, Nimrod, and many others. Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, he has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and he is the recipient of a number of grants, including one from the Bush Foundation to support his first novel, which is about Auschwitz. After living in Europe for many years, he now enjoys thunderstorms rolling across Midwest America.