Terrible Beauty

David Olsen's second chapbook, New World Elegies, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June 2011. His Greatest Hits 1983-2000 (ISBN 1-930755-84-8) is among the volumes in the Greatest Hits invitational series of poetry chapbooks published by Pudding House.

A full-length collection manuscript, Mnemonics, was a finalist in the 2010 Bright Hill Press competition. A 10-page sampler from the chapbook manuscript Requiescat was a finalist in the 2009 poetry collection competition of The New Writer magazine, and a 10-page sampler from the chapbook manuscript Sailing to Atlantis was long-listed for the 2010 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award.

His poems, plays and stories have earned recognition in more than 50 literary competitions in North America and UK. In 1990 David became the fourth recipient (in 11 years) of the Daly City Arts Commission trophy for excellence in poetry. Since 2008 David’s poems have won UK competitions sponsored by Writing Magazine and the Deddington Festival, and earned commendations from the Bedford Prize, Nottingham Open, Newark Poetry Society, Yeovil Literary Prize, and Cannon Poets.

David’s poems have appeared in dozens of American and British anthologies and literary journals. In 1998 he became the only living North American anthologised in The Literature of Poverty at the World Bank’s internet website. In UK since 2008 his poems have appeared in Assent, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Nottingham, Oxford Magazine, Writing Magazine, ASH, The Nail, Countryside Tales, and competition anthologies.  David appears often at charity benefits and other readings.

A musical setting of “Winter Worry” by Cambridge composer Kate Waring was first performed by Jessica Lawrence-Hares in the Fitzwilliam Museum and Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2009.

Like the work of French and Russian Symbolists, David’s poems are richly metaphorical and multi-layered explorations of the ambiguities of life. His precise, compressed language and modulated rhetoric yield intensely concentrated poems that repay close reading to reveal deep resonances and alternative interpretations.

His stories have been broadcast on BBC Oxford and published in anthologies and literary magazines.

An Irish play, Two Roses, was described as “a superior piece of theatre … beautifully rendered” in a review of a 1992 professional equity production in Los Angeles. An expanded version earned commendation in a competition sponsored by the Oxford Playhouse in 2009. Several of his other plays have been read or performed before paying audiences in the Oxford Fringe Festival and other theatrical events in Oxford, San Francisco, Sutton Coldfield, and Easton, Pennsylvania.

Before moving to Oxford in 2002, he contributed 120 editorial-page essays and pieces of performing arts criticism to a Massachusetts newspaper. David is currently writing poetry and dramas, while advising other poets and fiction writers.

Formerly Manager of Energy Market Research at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), he is author of more than two dozen major research reports, technical papers, and articles, principally on energy economics. He was also a Senior Staff Writer/Editor with LSI Logic. He taught writing at De Anza College and graduate courses in marketing at Golden Gate University. David holds a BA in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and an MBA in management from Golden Gate University.

A member of the Dramatists Guild, the Poetry Society, Oxford Stanza and Back Room Poets, David is listed in The International Who's Who in Poetry, and as a poet and fiction writer in The Directory of Writers. His prize-winning fine art photographs are found in numerous private collections.