Wellspring Literary Series: Greg Rappleye

Greg Rappleye's poems have appeared in POETRY, The Southern Review,  The North American Review, NARRATIVE, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, Water-Stone Review, Southword (Ireland). His most recent collection, Barley Child (University of Arkansas Press, 2025), which concerns his Irish-American family, was selected by National Book Award winning poet Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. He is the author of four other poetry collections including A Path Between Houses (2000) Figured Dark (2007), and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds (2018), and was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Poetry at the 2002 Breadloaf Writers Conference. His honors and awards include the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin, a Pushcart Prize, The Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, The Greensboro Review Prize in Poetry, the Paumonok Prize in Poetry, The Arts & Letters Prize, the 49th Parallel Prize in Poetry, and the Fish International Poetry Prize (Ireland), selected by former American Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Greg is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He served for 26 years as Corporation Counsel for Ottawa County, Michigan, and also spent 25 years on the faculty of the English Department at Hope College. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

The Wellspring Literary Series is an annual reading series in downtown Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. Founded, facilitated and hosted by Robert Fanning, poet and Central Michigan University Professor of English, the series features Michigan writers or regional writers with Michigan ties. Since 2008, the series has brought some of the finest poets and writers to Mount Pleasant from across the state.

Each reading, the crowd is treated to not only readings by some of Michigan’s most prominent voices reading poetry, fiction and non-fiction along with Central Michigan University students, but these evenings also feature music by local musicians and students and faculty of the School of Music.