I’ve been working with Bart Sutter to record the history of the poet laureate program in Duluth. Sutter was the first poet laureate, and the only author to win the Minnesota Book Award in three different categories.

Sutter has written nine books so far, including My Father’s War and Other Stories (Viking, 1991, U of MN 2000), which won the 1992 Minnesota Book Award in Fiction. The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 1993) won the 1994 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. For several years, Sutter wrote and broadcasted monthly commentaries for Minnesota Public Radio, and these essays were collected in Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map (U of MN, 1998), which won both the 1999 Minnesota Book Award for Creative Non-fiction and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award.

He was a dynamic poet laureate, and we can read one of his reports of all the dynamic things he did as a poet laureate.

If you were part of these events, or have memories of them to share, I’d love to see them below.