Jeffery Beam's many award-winning works include The Broken Flower (Skysill Press, England), Gospel Earth (Skysill Press, England), Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse & Buggy), The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969-2012 (Spuyten Duyvil-Triton), Light and Shadow (Aperture), and The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press). His spoken word CD with multimedia What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001 was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. Beam's latest works are Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards (co-edited with Richard Owens, Prospecta Press, 2018), and a virtual chapbook Don't Forget Love (Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, 2018, dispatchespoetrywars.com/virtual-chapbooks/2018/04/ dont-forget-love-by-jeffrey-beam). The song cycle, Life of the Bee (composer Lee Hoiby) continues to be performed on the international stage and can be heard, along with a Beam reading of the texts, on Albany Record's New Growth, a recording of the Carnegie Hall premiere. Limited fine editions include An Invocation (Country Valley Press), On Hounded Ground: Home and the Creative Life (Bookgirl Press, Japan), MountSeaEden (Chester Creek Press), and Eno Crow (Horse & Buggy Press). A number of young composers have worked and are working with his poetry. Steven Serpa premiered the cantata Heaven's Birds: Lament and Song (based on three New Beautiful Tendons poems) on Boston's World AIDS Day 2008. His tone poem An Invocation premiered for string quartet in 2014 (Spartanburg, SC) and in 2016 as a symphonic piece (Austin Symphony). Serpa premiered The Creatures: A Bestiary Retold (Austin, 2016) and also plans a song cycle of gay love poems. Holt McCarley premiered an instrumental piece, The Hyena, from the Bestiary (St. Louis, 2015) and is working on two cycles based on Beam nature and love poems. 2015 also saw the premier of a Daniel Thomas Davis chamber opera Kith & Kin: Seven Portraits with song texts by several North Carolina writers, including Beam (restaged with North Carolina Opera premier in 2018). Tony Solitro's song Love's Astronomy was completed in August 2018 and by the time of this printing will have had its first performance. Forthcoming is Beam's first of several projected children's books The Droods with British artist Phil Cooper. Other projects include Bee, I'm Expecting You (bee poem anthology), and Blue Darter - Jonathan Williams: A Bibliography of the Publications and Ephemera, 1950-2008. He continues to work on the poetry collection Life of the Bee; Bee, I'm Expecting You-an anthology of bee poems, facts, and folklore through the ages; and They Say: A Commonplace Book on Poetry and the Spirit. Beam's poems and criticism have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. Poetry editor emeritus of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review, Beam retired in late 2011 from many decades as a UNC-Chapel Hill botanical librarian. Born in Kannapolis, North Carolina he lives in Hillsborough with his husband of 39 years, Stanley Finch. You can learn more about, read and hear more of his poetry at his website: www.jefferybeam.com
