CU Boulder author Erin Block earns 2024 Colorado Book Award for poetry

Erin Block, e-resources metadata & reporting manager at the University Libraries was recently awarded the 2024 Colorado Book Award for poetry for her debut poetry collection, How You Walk Alone in the Dark.

The Colorado Book Awards annually celebrates the accomplishments of Colorado’s outstanding authors, editors, illustrators and photographers.

Block shares what inspired her to write this collection and how it connects to other aspects of her life.

You’ve described yourself as a “librarian by day and a writer by night and fly fisher and fly tier on days off.” How do all these things come together for you? 

They all come together in the fact, and even celebration, that we are not just one thing. Foraging, gardening and hunting take precedence over fly fishing in my life now, and that’s a perfect example. We tend to define ourselves by how we make a living, or conversely, our hobbies or art, but none should be the single whole of who we are or prevent us from changing. I’ve always related to Stephen King’s advice that, “Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.” And lately I’ve appreciated something poet Victoria Chang said in an interview: ​"Being a writer isn’t what defines me. I just think I respond to the world.​"

Now that your book, How You Walk Alone in the Dark, has won a 2024 Colorado Book Award, what are your thoughts about getting this recognition and award for your debut poetry book?  

It is a huge honor! Awards validate a book and they validate a writer, too. I constantly doubt myself and my work, which is good in many ways, as questioning can be a form of quality control. But too much self doubt is a hobble that keeps you from moving forward. This recognition is a humbling affirmation. 

Tell me about the book. Where did you draw your inspiration for the poems?

I had a lot of emotionally complicated things going on in my life at the time: I made the decision to start hunting, my soul mate dog, Banjo, was in his last years, and my mother received a serious health diagnosis. So I was constantly thinking about life and death and poetry was the perfect vessel for these themes.

What inspired you to start writing poetry in the first place?

The idea of distilling an experience down to its core was very attractive. If I can say something in three lines instead of three pages, I want to do that. I think poetry can be some of the most powerful writing because it’s so condensed, such a gut punch. 

Describe your day job. Does your work at the University Libraries influence your writing or understanding of published works?

It absolutely does! Much of my work for the libraries involves making electronic resources discoverable and accessible in the library catalog and discovery layer, OneSearch. If I do my work well, no one notices: they can find the resources they need and access them. One of the five laws of library science, as written by S. R. Ranganathan, is, “Save the time of the reader.” This can mean having resources cataloged with correct metadata and working URLs, and it can also mean omitting needless words, à la Strunk & White, and drilling a poem down to only what’s necessary. 

The poems in this book explore nature, reciprocity, aging, death and the passage of time. What do you hope readers will take away or feel after reading this collection?

I just hope readers will feel something. I think poetry should create an emotional reaction in a reader and I hope through the specifics in my work, readers can experience that. James Joyce said, “In the particular is contained the universal,” and I think a good poem offers details that allow a reader to relate specifics to their own lived experience. I hope my poems do that for readers. 

This book begins with poems set in winter and then moves through the seasons to fall. It also starts with your life in the mountains now and ends with the plains where you grew up. How did you decide on this structure and what effect were you trying to achieve?

The organization came very organically. Because of foraging and hunting, I track my life by season, not calendar year, so it made sense for the book to follow that pattern. I also wanted to follow a linear timeline of the last year of my dog Banjo’s life. It wouldn’t have made sense to reference interacting with him after a poem about his death. The Mountains and Plains sections also seemed to be a natural choice as my year gets broken up in that way. I live in the mountains, but for many days in the winter I migrate to the plains to hunt. 

Do you have a favorite poem or is there one that feels emblematic of the whole collection? What makes it stand out?

I think one of my favorites in the collection is, “What’s the Word.” It stands out to me because it reads quietly. When I’ve read it out loud I notice my voice becomes a whisper. At the poem’s essence is me imagining how deer communicate. How do fawns know to stay put when their mother leaves them hidden, scentless, for the day? There’s a real intimacy in trying to understand behavior and instincts of another species and not just observe. And I think that may be emblematic of the collection—a focus on participating in the life and death cycles of nature and not just observing them from a distance.

What’s next for you?

To write one good poem. And then another. I’m a slow writer and don’t think I write my best if I’m writing toward a project. So just one poem and then another is how I’ll write another book.