Faculty Profile: Tony Whedon
Tony Whedon lived for years at a time in Paris, Greece and Spain and has traveled across four continents. He was involved in the civil rights movement and taught at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s alma mater. His poems, memoir and critical essays based on experiences roaming the world and getting to know its many inhabitants, appear in more than 80 magazines and literary journals. His collection of essays on exile, A Language Dark Enough, won the Mid-List Press award for creative non-fiction. "Concentricities," a five-page poem about student protest in China, was published in Harper's a few years ago.
Tony teaches classes in prose writing and literature. He performs his poetry and plays the trombone in PoJazz, a band of faculty and student musicians and writers who experiment with music and verse at gigs around New England.
"I always wanted to be the kind of writer that I am," says Whedon, who grew up on Long Island but is at home with his wife, Suzanne, on property that was formerly a commune in Montgomery, Vermont. For 15 years they didn't have electricity or running water and many of his nature essays in a forthcoming book, Drunk in the Woods, have been inspired by that experience, which he points out, "lasted five times longer than Thoreau's."
