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John
John Crews
John Crews is the author of poetry and plays set in the South. At
its best his work is skillful and moving. As he took to imaginative
writing late in life, and as he has to date published little, his
body of work is small and scarcely known a situation time
may remedy.
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Crews
was born in Monroe, Michigan, on May 25, 1926, but grew up, from
the age of 6 months, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After his high school
graduation in 1944, he joined the United States Navy and subsequently
attended, on the G.I. Bill, the University of the South in Sewanee,
Tennessee. Having earned a B.A. in English, Crews taught in a Mississippi
high school during the 1950-51 academic year. Then, for ten years,
he worked as a newspaper editor and editorial writer in both Mississippi
and Florida. In 1953 he married June Lowrey, by whome he had four
children, and in 1961 he returned to school as a graduate student
at the University of Virginia. Crews received a Ph.D. in 1966 and
joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi, where he taught
in the English Department until his retirement in 1988. He and his
wife continued to reside in Oxford, Mississippi.
Six of
John Crews' poems have been published, in journals and in the third
volume of the series Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood
and Youth. Three of them, perhaps because he began writing so
late in life, are elegies: "Sabbath Coin," "of the dead so little
recognized," and "Caught Caught Caught" which seamlessly
fuses the cry of a childhood game with death. "Bread and Wine" and
"How" both take as their central image the Christian Eucharist.
"Lifeboat" is the dramatic monologue of a sailer who received an
undesirable discharge because of homosexual activity.
Crews
has written four plays. In 1988 Easter's Children, set in
Mississippi in the 1930s, won second place in the New Orleans Contemporary
Arts Center's contest for Southern playwrights and was given a staged
reading in New Orleans. Playwright Terrence McNally, the contest
adjudicator, declared Easter's Children to be "rich in language,
poetic in vision and deeply moving in expression of human suffering
and redemption." Another of Crews' plays, Of Two Minds, presents
the struggle of a strong-willed chancellor of the University of
Mississippi during the ferment leading up to the Civil War. In 1992
it was given a staged reading in the University's Barnard Observatory
(named after that chancellor), as part of the celebration of the
building's restoration. Ghostly Company and A Violent
Season focus on racial struggle in the 1960s and 1980s, and
The Peculiar Hand of God, a play-in-progress, is about the
conflict between a nineteenth century evangelist and his recalcitrant
and independent sister-in-law.
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Related Links & Info
Vicksburg
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- Publications
- Poetry:
- "Bread and Wine." Christian Century 98.5 (18 February 1981): 157.
- "Caught Caught Caught." Carolina Quarterly 35.1 (Autumn 1982): 17. Rpt. in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. Ed. Dorothy Abbott. Vol. 3. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. 83-84.
- "Lifeboat." Poetry Now 7.1 (1982): 10.
- "Sabbath Coin." Texas Review 4.1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1983): 101. Rpt. in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. Ed. Dorothy Abbott. Vol. 3. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. 84-85.
- "How." Cumberland Poetry Review 6.1 (Fall 1986): 17.
- "of the dead so little recognized." Cumberland Poetry Review 6.1 (Fall 1986): 18.
- Bibliography:
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- Internet Resources
- Articles:
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