Exhales (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781545590720)

As a junior studying neuroscience and psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Brian Selkirk became the 2017 winner of the NFSPS College Undergraduate Poetry Meudt Award for his manuscript, "Exhales." In both 2015 and 2016 he also won first place in the Sharon Naughton Student Writing Contest for Poetry at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan. Selkirk, a Michigan native, remembers that he began writing at the age of nine or so, when he and his family lived on a sheep farm near Gladstone, a small city tucked inside the Little Bay de Noc on the southern coast of the Upper Peninsula, and then more decisively at the age of nineteen, with the intervening years having no such interest and no ambition. He relates that what prompted his second taking up of the pen was a sense of mysticism, urgency, and romance-a quest for experience and the unlived life. His current writing goals, which he insists remain fluid, include the working out of universal conceptions of poetry that seek to restore to readers a sense of the serious, and to continue writing essays on subjects such as poetry, work, fashion, intelligence, trends, and thought, which he may consolidate into a book.