has published widely in small magazines and anthologies including The Asheville Poetry Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, The Double Dealer Redux, SPARKS OF FIRE: BLAKE IN A NEW AGE, THE SON OF THE MALE MUSE, YELLOW SILK ANTHOLGY, The Carolina Quarterly, Dreamworks, and The Worcester Review. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The Advocate, Smithsonian, The Front Page, Garden Design, The North Carolina Literary Review, The American Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Independent Weekly, Small Press Review, and loblolly.
Beam is the recipient of a 1991 Orange County Emerging Artist Grant.
The author, born and raised in Kannapolis, NC, earned a Bachelor of Creative Arts from UNC-Charlotte in 1975. At UNCC he served as editor of the arts magazine Sanskrit.
Poetry Editor of Oyster Boy Review and contributing editor to Brightleaf The Southern Review of Books, Beam is also known for readings that bring together music, poetry, and theater, oftentimes singing his own poems and well as the poetry of others, and incorporating Afro-American and Bluegrass gospel, folk songs, and show tunes into his performances.
He lives in Chapel Hill and works as the Assistant to the Biology Librarian in the Botany Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winter 1996 was the fourth year he has presented a children's program, Winter Stories, for the Friends of the Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Beam has four unpublished manuscripts, and three in progress. As well as a CD compilation in the next year or two.
THE GOLDEN LEGEND (FLOATING ISLAND PUBLICATIONS,
1981),
TWO PRELUDES FOR THE BEAUTIFUL (UNIVERSAL, 1981, limited edition),
MIDWINTER FIRES (FRENCH BROAD, 1990,nominated for a 1991-92 Pushcart Prize),
THE FOUNTAIN (N C WESLEYAN COLLEGE PRESS, nominated as a Notable Book by the American
Library Association, 1992),
VISIONS OF DAME KIND (THE JARGON SOCIETY, 1995),
and the forthcoming
SUBMERGENCES (OFF THE CUFF BOOKS, spring 1997).
"A Beam reading is an experience"
McIntyre's Fine Books
"When you hear a Jeffery Beam performance of his work expect the hair on your nect to
stand up." Jonathan Williams
"Many people think of poetry readings as tense formal affairs where heavy-starch
types go stiffen up. These people will be forced to change their mind...if they attend a
Jeffery Beam reading." The Independent Weekly
"You have a fire in your voice." Michael Rumaker
"What a joy, your poems, a tongue one can speak and read." Allan Gurganus
With great stealth and smoke
approach our dome. For if not,
a flame, dry and burning, a dazzling
destruction, only
momentary,
will greet you.
You, who threaten, let
this pin-prick, this red
fever-bite, be a warning.
In our Saracen tunnels,
we hold our own, asking
nothing.
(This is read with a fierce Scottish brogue)
Sweet angel, little Italian boy,
whose voice rises with his mother's
in the afternoon light and the old woman
crooning to her cat in the courtyard's shadow,
and the cooing of the pigeons, the
sounds of the piano
melancholy from an upstairs room,
this beautiful sameness greeting us each afternoon
as the day descends in the churches,
in the old town, and the Madonna,
San Sebastiano, San Michele,
flutter above the roof tiles,
their haloes, arrows, wings
trembling secretly, phrases
repeating over and over by the child,
and the room settling into soothing
monotony, and the sunset, and the sweet
angel Italian child waiting
impatiently for his supper to come.