Joe Milford Show: Recent Episodes
Joe Milford Show
William Trowbridge holds a B.A. in Philosophy and an M. A. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His poetry publications include five full collections: Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011), The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003), Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 2000, 1995, 1989), and three chapbooks, The Packing House Cantata (Camber Press, 2006), The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001) and The Book of Kong (Iowa State University Press, l986).
Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you're most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of The Sore Throat, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Within a limited vocabulary, Kunin finds hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness. Combining formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, The Sore Throat produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.
Connie Wanek is the author of three books of poems. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota, where she was a public librarian among other pursuits. In the fall of 2010 she was a visiting poet at Gustavus Adolphus College. Wanek's third book of poetry, On Speaking Terms, was a finalist for the MN Book Award and recently won the Northeast Minnesota Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. In 2006 she was named a Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry of the Library of Congress.
With humor and musicality, Martha Silano’s The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception rollicks through fourteen billion years of cosmology: galaxies, aliens, an astronaut’s dropped glove. When she’s not picking a bone with a short-sighted and side-talking populous, she’s conceiving her own personal Big Bang. When her nouns are diaper and bibs, Silano sticks to a larger vision, seeing past gelatinous mashed peas toward the moon and stars. This cosmic-consciousness is woven right in with the mittens and the meercats, her lens taking in not only the crumbs she must wipe up, but also polio-stricken nations, the hungry Eritreans, “the old man who shuffles along / as if he might be carrying / in that steamy bowl / all our children’s futures.” We’re all “sibling citizens of this swirly world,” writes Silano, but she knows that danger lurks not only in the heavens and the atmosphere, but on our glistening streets. As Campbell McGrath notes, The Little office of the Immaculate Conception is “comic and wise, quotidian and celestial.”
Aaron Kunin’s poems are literally outrageous. They are 1) a: exceeding the limits of what is normal or tolerable, b: not conventional; 2) violent or unrestrained in action or emotion; and (sometimes) 3) offensive. At the same time they are filled with the proper concerns of poetry. They are interested in divinity and accident, physical beauty and romantic love. They are inventive but not narrowly so. They are cutting without being ironic; they have pathos without sentimentality. In short, Kunin’s poems belong to the great tradition of the tragicomic. Jack Spicer once wrote that “A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary,” and Aaron Kunin has outrageously written an entire book using no more than two hundred words. In other words, he has created a drama for two hundred players, a world teetering brilliantly between containment and chaos. Anything can happen here—and does.
Lucia Perillo Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainer National Park, and moved to Olympia in 1987, where she taught at Saint Martin's College. For most of the 1990s Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. She currently resides in Olympia, Washington, with her husband and their dog.
Joshua McKinneyis the author of two award-winning books of poetry: Saunter, co-winner of the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2002, and The Novice Mourner, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize in 2005. He has also published two poetry chapbooks: Saunter (Primitive Publications, 1998) and Permutations of the Gallery (Pavement Saw Press, 1996), winner of the Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared in over one hundred national journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and many others. His other awards include The Dickinson Poetry Prize and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
Joshua is currently a professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, where he teaches courses in literature and various creative writing courses such as Between Genres: Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction, Meter & Rhythm: The Poem’s Heartbeat, and Ecopoetics.
Olstein grew up near Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first book of poems, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), won the Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth Award. Olstein is also the author of the poetry collection Lost Alphabet (2009). Her poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, LIT, and other journals. She has been awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Pushcart Prize. Of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, reviewer Kendra L. Tanacea commented: “Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane, bees next to bricklayers, purple finches next to garage doors, reason next to faith, chance near fate.” Olstein has been associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. She is a contributing editor of jubilat.
Brinks is a stalwart of the local poetry scene, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press, the journal YAWP (taken from Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”) and founder of the 17 Poets Literary and Performance Series at the Gold Mine Saloon. He and his wife, poet Megan Burns, have two children, Blaise (named for poet Blaise Cendrars) and Mina (named for poet Mina Loy). How does he do it all?
Bob Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Animal Soul (2001); and This Clumsy Living (2007). Hicok has won Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He once worked in the automotive die industry and owned his own business, Progressive Technology; he has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech.
Founder and editor of H_NGM_N literary journal and H_NGM_N BKS, Nate Pritts was born in Syracuse, New York. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2000 and a PhD in creative writing and British Romanticism from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, in 2003. His full-length collections of poetry include Sensational Spectacular (2007), Honorary Astronaut (2008), and The Wonderfull Yeare: a shepherd’s calendar (2010). Pritts has been compared to the New York School poets, including Frank O’Hara, for his joyous revelry in shifting registers of language. Olivia Cronk, reviewing for Bookslut, observed: “Pritts uses the language, tone, and awkward silliness of a 1950s sci-fi-comicbook-pow-bang-robot-technical-failure world.” Cronk ultimately identified Pitts as an “everyman, heart wrenchingly casting his powerless fist up into the air as the flying machines and automated check-out lines further crush his soul.” Pritts has taught business writing and communication, creative writing for talented high school students, and workshops for the Downtown Writer’s Center/YMCA in Syracuse, New York.
David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on December 27, 1954. He was raised in Missouri and has spent more than forty years of his life in the Midwest. Baker received degrees in English from Central Missouri State University before earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah in 1983. His first collection of poems, Laws of the Land, was published by Ahsahta/Boise State University in 1981, followed by Haunts (Cleveland State University) in 1985. Since then, Baker has published several collections of poetry, including Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009), Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2007), Midwest Eclogue (W. W. Norton, 2005), Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas, 2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), and Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991).
Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. Director of Letters and Science at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1993 to 1998, he taught art history, critical writing and poetry and directed the public lectures program there from 1984 to 2008. He studied at Trinity School, The Lawrenceville School, Brown University, Columbia, The New School for Social Research and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.†† He is the author of some twenty books and pamphlets of poetry -- including Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press, 2005), Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007), Goods and Services (Blue Press, 2008), Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009) and Lady Air (Perdika, 2010). His poems have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Other recent books are What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006); BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen (Gallery 16 Editions, 2008); Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman (Cuneiform Press, 2009), and Not an Exit with LÈonie Guyer (Jungle Garden Books, 2011).
Bradley Paulwas born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review,Smartish Pace, Fence, Pleiades, Iowa Review, and numerous other journals. In 2004 his first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. His second book, The Animals All Are Gathering, won AWP'S Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and was published in 2010 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Paul taught a variety of film, literature and writing classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University before relocating to the West Coast. He has also directed, written, line produced, and edited several short and feature films and commercials. A graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul.
Sarah Vap grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, where she studied English and American Literature. She later received her M.F.A. from Arizona State University. She is the author of three collections of poetry. Her first book, Dummy Fire, was selected by Forrest Gander to receive the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected by Ira Sadoff to receive the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her third book, Faulkner’s Rosary, was released by Saturnalia Books in 2010.
Tim Earley is the author of two collections of poetry, Boondoggle (2005) and The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, Conduit, Typo, and other journals. He is the recepient of two Writing Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi and does things at the University of Mississippi almost every day. He is currently at work on a third poetry manuscript, tentatively titled Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, including the Complete Text of the Yancey County Poem Cycle (which is an Appalachian retranscription/autotuning/mash up of the York Cycle Plays from the middle-ages olden times), and yes, the first part of the title is stolen from the quite mad and British son-of-a-farm-labourer poet John Clare's 1820 debut collection (which is not available through BlazeVox Books or SPD).
Cathy Wagner, a poet, was born in Burma and grew up in Baltimore. She is the author of three books, My New Job (Fence, 2009), Macular Hole (Fence, 2004) and Miss America (Fence, 2001). She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Utah, Boise State University, and now Miami. Her students have gone on to pursue MFAs and PhDs, to publish books of poems with Blazevox, Fence, Otis Books/Seismicity Editions and other presses, and to run small presses of their own.
David Gewanter is author of three poetry books: War Bird (2009); The Sleep of Reason (Chicago, 2003), finalist for the James Laughlin prize; and In the Belly (Chicago, 1997), awarded the John Zacharis First Book award. He is co-editor, with Frank Bidart, of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (FSG; Faber, 2003), winner of an Ambassador Book Award (English-Speaking Union–US), and named “Book of the Year” (Contemporary Poetry Review). The recipient of a Witter Bynner fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer’s award, Academy of American Poets prizes, and a Hopwood award, he teaches at Georgetown.
Further: As an undergrad, I majored in Intellectual History at Michigan; started writing poems in London, taught English in Barcelona, got an MA and PhD in English at Berkeley, ran writing programs at Harvard, and have since then taught at Georgetown.
Rusty Morrison's After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2012). Her book the true keeps calm biding its story won Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, and the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Awards from Poetry Society of America for a manuscript-in-progress. Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, The Book of the Given, will be published by Noemi Press this year. Besides the Alice Fay DiCastagnola, she has received the George Bogin, Cecil Hemley, and Robert H. Winner Memorial Awards Awards from Poetry Society of America. Morrison has also won the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank, the University of Montana's literary magazine. She is Omnidawn’s co-publisher (www.omnidawn.com).
Chase Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1950. She received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College (Hartford) in 1973 and earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1976.
Her books of poetry include Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2010), Dog Language (2005), The Snow Watcher (1998), The Ghost of Eden (1995), Perdido (1991), The Odds (1986), and Northern Spy (1981).
Matt Hart was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1969. He earned a degree in Philosophy from Ball State University and an MFA in Poetry from The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His first book Who’s Who Vivid was published by Slope Editions in 2006. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives with his wife and daughter in Cincinnati, where he teaches in the Academic Studies Department at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Matthew Lippman's newest collection, MONKEY BARS, is published by Typecast Publishing, based in Louisville, KY. His first collection, THE NEW YEAR OF YELLOW, is published by Sarabande Books and won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He lives with his family in the Boston area and teaches high school students at Beaver Country Day School.
Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad demystifies the most influential women present at the dawn of Islam and introduces us to Muhammad’s wives. Here they are in all their variety, among them a successful merchant, the leader of an army, two Jewish war captives, and a Coptic Christian diplomat. Here we see them, beautiful in their humanity, wily and wise, giving love advice, thwarting a rival’s marriage, serving the poor, saving a vital peace treaty.
Untold's unusual form, sometimes called prosimetrum, employs narrative prose interspersed with short lyrics in which the author’s voice urges these unmediated wives to come forward. The research-driven prose informs; the lyric poems create an intimacy that drops the reader deep into the story.
Tamam Kahn has written a "Prosimetrum" (prose with lyric poetry embedded in the narrative). The book contains 30 of her poems enlivening the stories of historical women. This non-fiction/poetry writing provides a vehicle for presenting material that hasn't been told to most of us –the lives of the wives of Prophet Muhammad. Tamam presents her findings at women’s gatherings, in schools and universities, and at conferences and festivals worldwide. She was invited in 2009 to read her poems in Marrakesh, Morocco, by invitation from the Royal government. At present she is on a tour of bookstores with her book: Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, Monkfish Books, September, 2010. Tamam lives in San Rafael with Shabda Kahn, her husband of 34 years. She is also editor of The Sound Journal.
Richard Monaco is author of "Parsival or a Knight's Tale" and "The Final Quest," both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
James Richardson’s main collections are Reservations (1977), Second Guesses (1984), As If (1992), How Things Are (2000), the “cult favorite” Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001), and Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (1977) and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats (1988). By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms will be published in the Fall of 2010.
Jen Rivers attends the University of West Georgia, where she studies English, German, and creative writing. She serves as an editor for the university’s creative magazine, Eclectic, and critical journal, LURe. She is the president of the university Creative Writing Guild and has studied abroad in Norway and Germany. Previous publications include Eclectic, Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches, Scythe Volume II, and Bowdon Intelligence. She has recently been notified as a finalist in the Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival.
"In his new book of poems entitled Anticline, Clayton Eshleman takes on many of the themes that he has been dealing with through his prolific career--the underlying violence of the American empire, the border between the animal and human, the ways in which the visual arts and poetry attempt to express the “the human” in all of its often inhuman complexity, with Francis Bacon and Bosch being especially relevant to his more recent poems, and also how the imagination can both trap and liberate us. I have to admit, I think Eshleman has become a better and better poet over the years, and Anticline is one of my favorite books of his yet."
Elizabeth Marie Young is a poet and classicist who recently completed her PhD in comparative literature at UC-Berkeley (she wrote her dissertation on Catullus and lyric translation).
Harry Calhoun is a widely published poet, article and essay writer. Check out his trade paperback, I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf, the recently published The Black Dog and the Road and his chapbook, Something Real. He’s had recent publications in Chiron Review, Chiaroscuro, Orange Room Review, The Centrifugal Eye, Monongahela Review and many others. He is the editor of Pig in a Poke magazine. Find out more at http://harrycalhoun.net. This just in: Harry’s new chapbook, Near daybreak, with a nod to Frost, is now available from Propaganda Press!
Chris McCreary is the author of two previous full-length collections, The Effacements (Singing Horse Press) and Dismembers (ixnay press), in addition to several chapbooks, including Sansom Agonistease (Potes & Poets Press). Along with his wife Jenn McCreary, he has co-edited ixnay press for over a decade, pub-lishing numerous chapbooks, eight issues of ixnay magazine, and four installments of a “mini-anthology” entitled the ixnay reader. (Much of the press’s output is now available as free pdf files at ixnaypress.com.)
Chris has reviewed fiction, poetry, and poetics for venues such as Rain Taxi, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Review of Contemporary Fiction, and he has published his own short fiction in New Review of Literature and elsewhere. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Temple University, and he teaches at a private high school outside of Philadelphia, where he lives with Jenn and their twin sons.
Victoria Brockmeier's first book of poems, my maiden cowboy names, won the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press. Her work has appeared in journals including LIT, New Letters, Pleiades, The Boston Review, and Chelsea, and she's currently completing a dissertation on twentieth-century poetry and poetics called Apostate, Sing This World Forth: Avant-Mythopoetic Encounters With Doubt, Chaos, and Community at the University at Buffalo. She is also founder and coordinator of dove|tail poetry, a readings and chapbooks series.
Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She is currently finishing a second full-length collection of poems called Mother was a Tragic Girl which will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series; she is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006).
Scott will be interviewing me tonight as I read from my recently published first collection, CRACKED ALTIMETER.
Adrian Blevins’ The Brass Girl Brouhaha was published by Ausable Press in 2003 and won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (Bright Hill Press, 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and many other magazines and journals. New poems can be read in an upcoming issue of The Georgia Review or heard on the audio web magazine From the Fishhouse. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Anne Whitehouse is a writer. She is the author of the novel Fall Love and the poetry collections, The Surveyor's Hand, Blessings and Curses, and Bear in Mind.
She has also written short stories, essays and feature articles, and book reviews.
In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and journalism, she has a distinguished career in development work for non-profit agencies. She has taught in colleges, universities, and public schools in the greater New York metropolitan area.
I continue to do volunteer work for causes related to autism and teach and write in northern California, where I live with my husband and three teenagers. I got my MFA from Warren Wilson College in January 2010, and my recent poetry is published or forthcoming in small print journals including Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, The Hudson Review, and Women’s Review of Books. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes, and a full length book, All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award and was released in April 2010. In 2010 Tebot Bach Press will release God, Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens.
Thomas Devaney is poet, teacher, and critic. He is the author of two poetry collections A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005). Devaney is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. In 2010 he lead the poetry tree tour “Under An Oak” in colloboration with the Haverford Arboretum.
Cohen’s poems and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary publications including The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The Indiana Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly. Disloyal Yo-Yo is his first collection of poems; another book of poetry, Swerve, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. He is a recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Born in the Bronx, New York, educated at the University of Arizona, he now lives with his wife and three sons in Connecticut, where he directs The Counseling Program for Intercollegiate Athletes at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
In his review of poetry collection The Future Is Happy, CL Bledsoe wrote, Sarah Sarai “grounds her work with revelation and emotional underpinning.” With poems in Minnesota Review, Threepenny Review, Parthenon West, PANK and others, and short fiction published in Tampa Review, Storyglossia, Fairy Tale Review and others, Sarai explores the usual: life, death and how we join with both. She has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is a native of New York, California and the great Pacific Northwest. For more, go to: www.myspace.com/sarahsarai. Sarah Sarai is the love child of Antelope Valley and the Hudson River. She's had poems in The Minnesota Review, The Threepenny Review, Main Street Rag, The Columbia Review, Fine Madness, PANK, and others; her short stories are in Weber Studies, The Houston Literary Review, Weber Studies, VerbSap, and others. Read on at www.myspace.com/sarahsarai.
Meg Pokrass writes flash fiction and poetry. She is the author of DAMN SURE RIGHT available Feb. 2011 from Press 53. Meg is the newly appointed editor-at-large the (former) Mississippi Review, now known as BLIP MAGAZINE re-launched this summer by Frederick Barthelme. Meg runs the Fictionaut Five Author Interview series for Fictionaut. Best known for her work in flash fiction, prose poetry and microfiction, Meg's work has been chosen for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Best Flash, and nominated for Dzanc’s Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her work has appeared in over 100 online and print journals, including the Mississippi Review, Gargoyle, Gigantic, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, The Nervous Breakdown, Storyglossia, and Everyday Genius. Meg lives in San Francisco with her small, creative family and 7 animals.
David Wolach is professor of writing, poetics, & philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and visiting poet in Bard College's Workshop in Language & Thinking. Prior to coming to Evergreen, Wolach did his graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University. After receiving his degrees he served as a union organizer in New York City for six years. Much of his work is multi-media and performative, and has been featured at venues such as Buffalo Poetics Series 2009, The American Cybernetics Conference 2009, the Belladona New Books/New Releases Series 2010 and Bard's Visiting Poets Series. David is the editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and curator of PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Conference. For a longer list of publications, click here.
Linda A. Cronin’s first book of poems, Dream Bones, is now available from WordTech Editions. She is a member of the Breath & Shadow, an online literary journal, editorial staff in poetry.
Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at an early age, Cronin first turned to reading as a way to transcend physical limitations. Through poetry writing, she found a way to express her voice and to describe life with a chronic, disabling disease. She has gone on to explore a number of areas in her work as a poet and often tries to be a voice for the unheard. Cronin has been active in the field of disability poetry and took part in a dialogue on women with disabilities and poetry in June 2009 that was published in Wordgathering. Linda Cronin's articles on disability and health and wellness have appeared in such magazines as Action and NJ Able as well as a number of newsletters.
John Hoppenthaler's poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, Southern Review, Christian Science Monitor, Barrow Street, The Laurel Review, The Florida Review, 5 AM, the anthologies September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press, 2002), Blooming through the Ashes: An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit (Rutgers UP, 2008), Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions, 2005), Poetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), and in many other publications. His essays, interviews, and essay/reviews appear in such journals as Arts & Letters, Southeast Review, Chelsea, Bellingham Review, Pleiades, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, The Cortland Review and Kestrel, where he served as Poetry Editor for eleven years.
Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2006). The collection received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two previous collections, Eve’s Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). A new book, Temptation by Water, is forthcoming from Wind Publications in 2010. Diane's poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. The recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Diane has also received awards from North American Review, Louisiana Literature, the Newburyport Art Association, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Benjamin Evans is the editor of the arts review, Fogged Clarity . His poems have appeared in Illya’s Honey, San Pedro River Review, on Anderbo.com and are forthcoming in Gargoyle 56 and Burning River. He is a graduate of Colgate University, where he played fullback and studied Immanuel Kant.
I'm from Long Beach New York. I went to Columbia University. Now I live in Philadelphia.
My first book, Union!, came out in 2009 on the Canarium Press. For the New Manchurians will come out in 2011, also on Canarium. I make movies. You can see them on youtube: www.youtube.com/user/ishkleinfilms Poor Claudia, of Portland Oregon will be releasing a dvd compilation of my movies in 2011.
Connor Stratman is a writer currently living in Chicago. His work has appeared in journals such as ditch, Moria, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Oarystis, and Outsider Writers. He also edits the online poetry blog The Balloon. He is currently looking for a publisher for his first chapbook, "invisible entrances."
My poems have appeared in publications such as Iodine Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag and The Dead Mule. I am the author of two chapbooks. "At the A & P Meridiem" (Pudding House, 2009), "The Wait of Atom" (Folded Word, 2009). My first full length collection will be released in 2010 - Paper House from Folded Word Press.
Reginald Gibbons (b. 1947) is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, artist, and Professor of English, Classics, and Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. Gibbons has also published numerous essays and reviews, held Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry, and has won the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, the Folger Shakespeare Library's 2004 O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His most recent book, Creatures of a Day, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry.
Scott Shelton attended West Georgia University. He has been writing and performing his pieces for over twenty years. He is a Georgia Phone Man, loving husband, and he will kick your ass.
Meg Kearney is the author of the poetry collection An Unkindness of Ravens and The Secret of Me, a novel in verse for teens. Her picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and in such publications as Agni, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares,and Poetry, as well as in numerous anthologies. Director of the Solstice Low-Residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and the Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference, Meg was associate director of the National Book Foundation for eleven years. She also taught poetry at the New School University. A repeat fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Meg has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York Times. She is a past president of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Association of upstate New York. Meg was born in Manhattan and currently resides in New Hampshire. For more information, visit www.megkearney.com.
Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College and coordinator of the Poetry Alive reading series in Hickory, NC. His first book of poetry, The Persistence of Faith, was published in 1995 by Sandstone Press and his second boon, The Fractured World was published by Main Street Rag in 2008. He has received awards for his work from the Academy of American Poets and the North Carolina Writer's Network. Recent work has appeared in North American Review, Main Street Rag, Pedestal, Georgia Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Cream City Review among others. Born in Greenwood, SC, he has lived in North Carolina, where he completed his MFA from UNCG, for over 20 years.
Larry Johnson was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1945 and grew up in Jackson. He attended Mississippi College for his BA and then the University of Arkansas, receiving his MA and MFA degrees in 1970. He has taught at Alma College, the University of New Orleans, North Carolina State University, and Louisburg College. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the fall of 2006 he gave a reading of his poems at the Library of Congress. Veins is his first published volume of poetry.
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of Tsim Tsim (Saturnalia Books, 2009), The Babies (Saturnalia Books, 2004), and the chapbook Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales (Woodland Editions, 2006).
John Dorsey currently resides in Toledo, OH. He the author of several collections of poetry including the forthcoming "Sodomy is a City in New Jersey" being published by American Mettle Books in 2010. His work has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reach at archerevans@yahoo.com
Cal Bedient has published three collections of poetry: Candy Necklace (Wesleyan University Press, 1997), The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia Press, 2002), and Days of Unwilling (Saturnalia Books, 2008). He has authored five books of literary criticism and his reviews and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Salmagundi, Boston Review, Partisan Review, and Parnassus. He is a co-editor of the New California Poetry Series (University of California Press) and of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion.
Arlene Ang serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her third full-length collection, Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2010. She lives in Spinea, Italy. You can visit her website www.leafscape.org.
"Of all the realities that man sees and contemplates in the world beyond, those which delight, like houris, castles, gardens, green vegetation, and steams of running water - as well as their opposites - the horrifying kinds of which Hell is composed - none of these is extrinsic to him, to the very essence of his soul, none is distinct or separated from his own act of existing." Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, 165
Eshleman at Poets.org Sulfur Journal Homepage (Interview on the ending of Sulfur)
Kenneth Warren in his recent review of Grindstone for The Denver Quarterly writes: "For roughly half a century, Clayton Eshleman has embraced, like nobody else in American poetry, a massive practice of self-creating engagement with emotionally stirring artists, poets and psychologists. By way of editing, lecturing, teaching, translating, travelling, and writing, Eshleman has formed an interdisciplinary body of work, which through complex relationship with others feeds and radiates a powerfully realized madcap love for the rough and tumble of human experience, imagination, and instincts."
"Nobody is like him in a struggle. With ornery stubbornness, Clayton Eshleman has kept visiting the dark occasions, and brought back for us poems unlike anybody else’s. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition." ––Robert Kelly
Writing career Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965). Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roy Choudhury, with whom he had correspondence, now archived at Kolkata.
Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time. He also serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
“Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an ‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school, get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot through with loss and, finally, redemption.” —Kim Addonizio, author of Ordinary Genius
“Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you by the collar and compel you to listen.” —Jim Daniels, author of Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies
The Harvard Review has said "Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier's colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence."
Her work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The American Poetry Review awarded her the Jerome Shestack Prize in 2001. She received a Pushcart prize in 2002, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA.
She directs the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and along with Noy Holland and Lisa Olstein co-directs the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.
John Olson is an American poet and novelist. Born August 23, 1947 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Olson has lived for many years in Seattle, Washington. He has published eight collections of poetry and one novel, Souls of Wind, nominated for The Believer Magazine book of the year award. In 2004, Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, for whom he has written occasional essays, gave Olson one of its annual "genius awards." His writing notebooks have been exhibited at the University of Washington. Olson's prose poetry has been reviewed in print and online poetry magazines. The poet Philip Lamantia said that Olson was "extraordinary...the greatest prose poetry [i've] ever read." and Clayton Eshleman said "he is writing the most outlandish, strange, and inventive prose poetry ever in the history of the prose poem." His new collection of poems, Larynx Galaxy, is due out in late summer on Black Widow Press, and he also has a book, The Nothing That Is, which will be coming out on Ravenna Press next month which is an autobiography written in the second person.
Join Joe, Kyle Taylor, Leverett Butts, and other RPW scholars for poems and insights regarding this great writer's work.
Jen Currin lives in Vancouver, B.C., where she rides her bike nearly everywhere and grows vegetables in her front yard. She has published two books of poems, Hagiography (2008) and The Sleep of Four Cities (2005). A new collection, The Inquisition Yours, will be out in March of 2010. Jen teaches writing and literature at Vancouver Community College and Langara College.
Steve Langan graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. He is currently working toward a PhD at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he founded and facilitates the Seven Doctors Project (http://blog.unmc.edu/sevendocs/). He teaches in the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program.
Langan’s collections of poetry are Meet Me at the Happy Bar (BlazeVOX, 2009), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (Backwaters, 2005), and Freezing (New Issues, 2001). Langan’s poems appear in a variety of publications, including, recently, Beloit Poetry Journal, Fence, The Iowa Review, MAKE, Notre Dame Review and Zoland Poetry. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and on Cliff Island, Maine.
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency and more recently, a 2006 Whiting Writers’ Award. Sherwin has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press 2003). His next book, Flood Song, is scheduled for release in October of 2009 from Copper Canyon Press* . http://www.bitsui.com/
Called by THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW, “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is the author of four books of poems, the award-winning FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT, ONE LEGGED DANCER and SCATTERED RISKS , WITHOUT THE COMFORT OF STARS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (2007 Sampark Press, New Delhi and London), and, her latest, CRAZY LOVE (2009 Wings Press). She is also the author of several chapbooks of poems, including PAM USCHUK’S GREATEST HITS (2009, Pudding House Press). CRAZY LOVE has been nominated for several prizes, including the National Book Award and a Tufts Kingsley Award. Uschuk’s work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Albanian, and Korean. Her work has appeared in over two hundred fifty journals and anthologies worldwide, including POETRY, PARNASSUS REVIEW, AGNI REVIEW, PLOUGHSHARES, and PEQUOD. Uschuk also publishes nonfiction articles in such journals as PARABOLA, TERRAIN and INSIDE/OUTSIDE. Uschuk’s literary prizes include the Struga International Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the 2001 Literature Award from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council for FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT, The King’s English Priza as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, IRIS, ASCENT, SANDHILLS REVIEW, and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Nearly 30 individual poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She has been a featured writer at Prague Summer Workshops (the latest, 2009) the University of Pisa, International Poetry Festivals in Malmo Sweden and Struga, Macedonia, the British School in Pisa, Italy, Vilenica in Slovenia, the Prague Summer Workshops, Gemini Ink Writers Festival, the Meacham Writers Conference, the Book Marks Book Fair, the Scandinavian Book Fair, the Deep South Writers Conference, the Universities of Arizona, Montana, Gothenberg (Sweden), Oregon, Montana State, Colorado State and California State Universities.
Ed Skoog, who worked for years in the basement of a museum in New Orleans, developed personal connections to objects and paintings. “Working on an exhibition about the building trades was important to this book,” he writes. “Spending weeks listening to the oral histories of plasterers, steeplejacks, and carpenters connected me to my own family’s stories.” Marked by uncommonly intense and considered use of language, Skoog demonstrates a rich attention to form and allusive narrative as he attends to the details of contemporary politics, culture, place, and relationships.
“Ed Skoog's poetry is so ambitious it takes my breath away. In it, he creates dense narratives, sees patterns, sees dissimilitudes, knows how to fishtail with images and turn with ease, knows how to braid pop culture into small personal melancholies and into large generosities.” The Stranger
Ted Mathys is the author of The Spoils, forthcoming from Coffee House Press, and Forge, from the same publisher. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, his poems have appeared in such venues as American Poetry Review, BOMB, Conjunctions, and Jubilat. His work has been anthologized in A Best of Fence: the First Nine Years, and Verse, 1994 - 2004: The Second Decade, as well as translated into Italian for La nuova poesia Americana: New York. Originally from Ohio, he has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Berlin, and New York and currently studies international affairs at Tufts University in Boston.
With breakup and divorce rates so high in the United States, who wouldn't want to read an eclectic volume of poems on the subject? Therapeutic and transformative, edgy yet sincere, enlightening, wideranging, female and male, gay and straight, innocent and guilty, It's Not You, It's Me: The Poetry of Breakup incorporates work from as many different perspectives as possible in order to explore the exquisite pain of heartbreak. Such top-shelf contributors as National Book Award finalist Kim Addonizio, bestselling author Denis Johnson, former poet laureate Mark Strand, Edward Hirsch, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, and many others proudly offer up their wisdom on the various pains (and humors) of heartbreak. In this stunning collection, readers will not find false hope, but the real hope of genuine sympathy in love, hate, fury, and recuperation.
Kate Durbin is the author of The Ravenous Audience(Black Goat Press/Akashic 2009), as well as the chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot (Dancing Girl Press 2009). Find her on the web at www.katedurbin.blogspot.com, and www.katedurbin.com.
Paul A. Toth lives in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of three novels, his latest being Finale (http://amzn.com/1933293853). The majority of his short fiction, poetry and multimedia work, as well as links to order his novels, can be accessed at http://www.netpt.tv.
Gina Myers currently lives in Saginaw, MI, where she is the Associate Editor of 360 Main Street, the Reviews Editor of H_NGM_N, and the bookmaker for Lame House Press. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Model Year, was published in July 2009 by Coconut Books.
“In a country where the corpses of political poems often litter our streets, with very little meaning being left behind, the poetry of Oprava offers an intense hope through the examination of a variety of issues, facing not only America, but the world. “American Means” offers readers of modern verse a narrative forum on homelessness, gay marriage, religion, corporate greed, health care, history, pop culture, nostalgia, and the end of the ice age. In this one book, Oprava has accomplished what many writers spend their whole literary careers working toward, he has given value back to our dreams.”
-poet John Dorsey
Wolff received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was an assistant editor of the Iowa Review.
She created Fence Magazine in 1997, with an editorial staff including Jonathan Lethem, Frances Richard, Caroline Crumpacker, and Matthew Rohrer, and Fence Books in 2001.[2] Fence is now headquartered at the University at Albany, where Wolff teaches classes for the New York State Writers Institute in Poetry and Creative Writing.
"Bibbins . . . has the courage to stop, to pin down the always irrational present moment, and the reader is eager to follow, to inhale its scathing or enticing perfume. . . . A brilliant young poet."--John Ashbery
In his second collection, The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Lambda Award winner Mark Bibbins pressures language into a performance of surprising, invigorating movements across syntax and line. Vulnerable, yet suspicious and sharp-witted, he responds to a nation responsible for and besieged by a bankrupted presidency, employing concise lyrics and longer sequences while in the process inventing a new form, the exploded double haiku.
Incited by progressive blogs, ad campaigns, elegy, and Eros, Bibbins addresses environmental catastrophe and grotesque political posturing in our nascent millennium, as well as the corporate media's willingness to front for the worst offenders as it both panders and condescends to audiences drunk on doublespeak.
These are songs of passionate and ambivalence sung in a dark time.
Heather Derr-Smith was born in Dallas, Texas in 1971. She spent most of her childhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She received her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of Virginia, where she also took poetry workshops with Charles Wright, Rita Dove, and Greg Orr. She went on to earn her M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her first book, entitled "Each End of the World", was a collection of poetry about the war in Bosnia in the 1990's and was published my Main Street Rag Press in 2005. Her second collection, entitled "The Bride Minaret" was published at University of Akron Press.
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s first book of poems, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard, Spoon River and Passages North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and a residency from Hedgebrook. Sweeney holds an MFA from Vermont College and serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney.
Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007), and the editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009) and coeditor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review. Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Verse, Black Warrior, Poetry International, Barrow Street, Denver Qtly, Passages North and American Letters & Commentary. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature/creative writing at Western Michigan University where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.
Gillian Conoley’s most recent collection is THE PLOT GENIE with Omnidawn Publishing (fall 2009). The author of six collections of poetry, her work has appeared in over 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, and Best American Poetry. She has received the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University. She is currently translating Henri Michaux’s Four Hundred Men on the Cross.
Dana Guthrie Martin has been described as akin to “watching someone eat their young only probably a lot prettier.” She and her husband share their Seattle-area home with two hermit crabs, their robot, Feldman, and their hand puppets, Princess Baby Toes and Captain Baby Pants. She is the founder of Read Write Poem (http://readwritepoem.org) and co-editor of Mutating the Signature (http://mutatingthesignature.org). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blood Orange Review, Blossombones, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut, Failbetter, Fence, Knockout Literary Magazine and Weave Magazine. Her chapbook, The Spare Room, is available from Blood Pudding Press. She blogs at My Gorgeous Somewhere (http://mygorgeoussomewhere.org).
TOM HEALY's poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, the Yale Review, Paris Review, Tin House, Salmagundi and other journals. He studied at Harvard and Columbia. He lives in New York City and Miami. “The electric immediacy of these poems is an assault on silence, a gunshot fired across the bow of genteel decorous well-mannered lying and silence. At times, but seldom, they give us something sharp-edged but more comfortable (e.g., a portrait of Lauren Bacall choosing fruit). I love how everything here ‘haunts us with choice.’ This is a superb book.”—Frank Bidart
Frank Reardon was born in feb of 1974 in Boston mass, He has published three collections of poetry, “cancer Face”, Mental health center energy and exorcism of the conartist. He has also published with many other mags and forums such as Lamshadian army, zygote in my coffee, kill poet, quillbillies, Atlantic press to name a few. Frank is currently on too much vicodin working on a ful length novel but still wants to write poems and do readings from time to time.
Al Maginnes is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently a chapbook, Dry Glass Blues (Pudding House Publications, 2007) and Ghost Alphabet which won the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize and will be available in October of 2008. New poems appear or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Green Moutains Review, Terminus, Mid American Review and Southern Poetry Review. He lives in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Wake Technical Community College.
Clayton Eshleman's most recent collection of poems, Anticline, is a manuscript to be published by Black Widow Press in April,2010. Recent book publications by Clayton Eshleman include he Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), his translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, 2007) and Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007). From time to time, in June, Clayton and his wife Caryl lead a tour to the Upper Paleolithic painted caves in southwestern France, sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL. Next trip will be in June 2010, with the ethnographer Wade Davis coming along as guest lecturer.
Clayton Eshleman's most recent collection of poems, Anticline, is a manuscript to be published by Black Widow Press in April,2010. Recent book publications by Clayton Eshleman include he Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), his translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, 2007) and Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007). From time to time, in June, Clayton and his wife Caryl lead a tour to the Upper Paleolithic painted caves in southwestern France, sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL. Next trip will be in June 2010, with the ethnographer Wade Davis coming along as guest lecturer.
Anne-Marie Cusac is the author of the poetry books, Silkie (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2007), winner of the Many Mountains Moving Press poetry book prize, and the Wisconsin Library Association award; and The Mean Days (Tia Chucha, 2001), which won recognition from both the Wisconsin Library Association and the Council for Wisconsin Writers. An As- sistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Roosevelt University, where she heads the Journalism Program, Cusac is also a George Polk Award-winning journalist and worked as an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine for ten years. She is currently a member of the blog team forThe Huffington Post. Her nonfiction book, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, was published by Yale University Press in 2009.
Feeding the Fear of the Earth is out on Many Mountains Moving Press. Patrick Lawler's two earlier collections of poetry are: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough (U of Georgia Press) and reading a burning book (Basfal Books). He has been awarded fellowships by the NY State Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. In addition to being an Associate Professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry where he teaches Environmental Writing and Nature Literature, he teaches creative writing at Onondoga Community College. He is also part of the Creative Writing Program at LeMoyne College, where he teaches creative writing, playwriting, and writing for performance.
Alison Stone’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. Her first book, They Sing at Midnight, won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. Her chapbook of tarot poems, From the Fool to the World, is forthcoming from Parallel Press. She is also a visual artist and the creator of The Stone Tarot.
Susan Settlemyre Williams is the author of a chapbook, Possession (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, 42opus, Shenandoah, Sycamore Review, the Marlboro Review, and diode, among other journals. Her poem “Lighter” won the 2006 Diner Poetry Contest and was selected for Best New Poets 2006. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a JD from the University of Richmond and is book review editor and associate literary editor of Blackbird. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Jeffrey Ethan Lee's poetry book, identity papers, was a 2006 Colorado Book Award finalist [http://identitypapers.org]. His first poetry book, invisible sister, at http://mmmpress.org/ was a finalist for the first MMM Press poetry prize. Lee won the 2002 Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook prize for The Sylf (2003), created identity papers for Drimala Records, published Strangers in a Homeland (chapbook with Ashland Poetry Press, 2001), and published hundreds of poems, stories and essays in North American Review, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Many Mountains Moving, Crosscurrents, American Poetry Review, Green Mountain Review, Washington Square. He teaches creative writing at West Chester University. He has a Ph.D. in British Romanticism and an MFA from NYU.
Lee’s books have been used at LeMoyne College (Syracuse, NY), Drexel University (Phila., PA), The Honors College of Penn State Erie, Ashland U MFA program (Ashland, Ohio, and Moravian College (Bethlehem, PA).
Robyn Schiff's books are Worth (Kuhl House Poets Series, University of Iowa, 2002) and Revolver (Kuhl House, 2008). Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Chicago Review, Fence, Volt, and elsewhere, and anthologized in Legitimate Dangers, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections, and other anthologies. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she directs the undergraduate creative writing program.
Nick Twemlow's poems have been published in A Public Space, Boston Review, Fence, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, and elsewhere. He coedits Canarium Books, and is the new poetry editor of The Iowa Review. He is currently an MFA student in film production at the University of Iowa.
Ander Monson is the author of a bunch of media, including a decoder wheel, broadsides, a website, a couple chapbooks, and five books, including two forthcoming in 2010: a nonfiction project, Vanishing Point (Graywolf), and a poetry collection, The Available World (Sarabande). He edits the journal DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at the University of Arizona but dreams in Michigan.
Emily Van Duyne was born and raised just south of Atlantic City, NJ, where she still lives with her husband and two dachshunds, George Michael Bluth and Sergio Leone. She teaches writing at Atlantic Cape Community College, amongst six or seven other odd jobs. Most recently, she won the first ever season of ‘Project Verse’; check out her poems at www.dustinbrookshire.com.
Puma Perl is a poet and fiction writer who believes strongly in the transformative power of the creative arts. Her work has been published in over 100 print and online journals and anthologies. Her first chapbook, Belinda and Her Friends, was published in 2008 and recently was awarded the Erbacce Press 2009 Poetry Award; a full length collection, knuckle tattoos, will be published early in 2010. She performs her work in many venues, in and out of New York City. Recent features include Cornelia Street Café , the Riverwood Poetry Festival, Middleton CT – Outlaw Night, and the HOWL Festival. She lives and writes on the Lower East Side and has facilitated writing workshops in community based agencies and at Riker’s Island, a NYC prison. She is a member of Harmattan Theater, a performance group dedicated to environmental and socially engaging theater.
Patrick Herron (http://patrickherron.com) is a poet, artist and information scientist from Chapel Hill, NC, USA. His doll Lester is the author of _Be Somebody_ (2008, Effing Press), about which Pultizer winner Ron Silliman wrote, "Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are." Patrick is the author of several books of poetry including _The American Godwar Complex_ (2004, BlazeVox) as well as a recent book on the relationship between text mining and scientific discovery in medicine (2008, Verlag Dr. Mueller). He is now working on a new volume of poetry tentatively entited _Embedded_. Patrick's work has appeared in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and his _proximate.org_ (http://proximate.org) was the first new media poetics site added to the permanent collection of the New Museum for Contemporary Art. You may find some of Patrick's poems and essays in print and online journals such as _The Exquisite Corpse_, _Jacket_, _Fulcrum_, _Fanzine_, _A Chide's Alphabet_, and _Talisman_. He is the founder of the Carrboro International Poetry Festival, a member of the board of Carolina Wren Press, winner of the 2005 Triangle Arts Award from _The Independent_ (Durham NC), and a former Carrboro NC Poet Laureate. Patrick teaches new media studies, develops serious games (http://virtualpeace.org), and studies global innovation networks for the Jenkins Chair at Duke University.
Joshua Clover (b. 30 December 1962 in Berkeley, California) is a poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA; his first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Clover is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999-2000. He writes a column of film criticism for Film Quarterly under the title "Marx and Coca-Cola", is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, and is a former senior writer for Spin. His film criticism includes a book on The Matrix for the British Film Institute, and the Criterion Collection essays for Band of Outsiders and Straw Dogs. His birth name was Joshua Miller Kaplan; via legal change, he took his mother's maiden name [See Clover's statement in Brooke Kroeger, Passing (2004), p. 207] His mother, Carol J. Clover, Ph.D., is the originator of the final girl theory and a professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.
CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com and also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com
Tammy Foster Brewer (formerly Trendle) was born, raised, and still resides in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her Bachelors in English from Georgia State University in 1997 and has been working as a litigation paralegal for 11 years. Her work has been published in many online and print journals including: The Pedestal, Rattle, storySouth, Denver Syntax, Kill Poet, Words Dance, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, MiPOesias, among others. She is married to the poet, Robert Lee Brewer, and has two sons and two stepsons who love to creep her out with fake plastic bugs and spiders. Her current chapbook, No Glass Allowed, is available through Verve Bath Press (www.wordsdance.com). She can be reached at tammyfbrewer@gmail.com.
Nick McRae has studied at the University of West Georgia and Masaryk University. He edits O Tempora! Magazine, an online journal of poetry and poetics, and has served as Editorial Assistant for the scholarly journals Lifewriting Annual and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. He lives in Carrollton, GA.
David Biespiel Founder, Director, & Writer-in-Residence
David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, & also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative & vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, & he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States. Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district.
Among his publications are The Book of Men and Women, Wild Civility, Pilgrims & Beggars, & Shattering Air. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Fellowship, & a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. David has taught at many colleges, including Stanford, George Washington University, University of Maryland, & Portland State University, & he has been the Richard H. Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the spring as an Adjunct Professor at Oregon State University, & in the summer on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
A contributor to American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, & The New Republic, David has been, since 2002, the columnist on poetry for The Oregonian. In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest, resurrecting the esteemed magazine into a national venue for outstanding poems and a lively discourse about p
Rick Reid is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer whose work combines public space, poetics, handwriting, photography, ink and the body. A book of poems, “To Be Hung from the Ceiling by Strings of Varying Length”—a 96 page serial work—has been published by Black Goat in April 2009 and was a finalist for the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Most recently his article “Frequency: Vito Acconci’s Frames of the Future Anterior” that considers the relationship of conceptual art to poetics is forthcoming in Binghamton University’s literary journal, Crossings. He is currently at work on a book length study of experimental poetry entitled Lapse: Radical Poetics and Apertures of the Human Machine and teaches Creative Writing and English as an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.
Radames Ortiz work has appeared in numerous literary journals including, Gulf Coast, Texas Observer, Open City, Hayden's Ferry Review, Cortland Review, and Exquisite Corpse. His work has also been collected in various anthologies which include, US Latino Literature Today, Regeneration: Telling Stories from Our Twenties, and Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas. He was nominated for a 2003 Pushcart Prize. He was also awarded a 2003 Archie D and Bertha Walker fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was the 2006-2008 Naomi Shihab Nye Scholar and was a featured poet at the Poetry at Roundtop Festival. You can follow him on twitter @radameso and read his blog at http://theamplifiedbard.blogspot.com/
Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. He was educated at Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He later became the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City. He is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist. He hosts the popular blog and video show www.everseradio.com. and is a video curator at Ryberg.com. His debut collection is Sixty Sonnets (2009).
Dara Wier was born in Louisiana in 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green University. Wier is the author of nine collections of poetry: Reverse Rapture (2005), Hat on a Pond (2002), Voyages in English (2001), Our Master Plan (1998), Blue for the Plough (1992), The Book of Knowledge (1988), All You Have in Common (1984), The 8-Step Grapevine (1980), Blood, Hook & Eye (1977). She was a Phi Beta Kappa award finalist for Our Master Plan. In fall 2006, Wave Books will publish Remnants of Hannah, Wier's tenth book. About her work, John Ashbery has said: “It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.” The Harvard Review has said "Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier's colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence." Her work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The American Poetry Review awarded her the Jerome Shestack Prize in 2001. She received a Pushcart prize in 2002, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She directs the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and along with Noy Holland and Lisa Olstein co-directs the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.
EDUCATION University of California, Riverside / Creative Writing, Master of Fine Arts: Creative Writing for the Performing Arts, 2009 CSU, Fullerton / American Studies, minor History, Bachelor of Arts, 1994 Fullerton College, Associate of Arts, 1989. TEACHING CSU, Fullerton, LARC, Instructor. 1992-1993. American Studies/History.Undergraduate. Corona-Norco USD, Substitute. 2008-pres. Grades K-12. PENDING WRITINGS A Garden of Flies. Scintillating Press. Chapbook. Autumn 2009 Crunked. Epic Rites Press. Chapbook. Spring 2010 With the Patience of Monuments. NeoPoiesis Press. Autumn 2009. PUBLISHED WRITINGS Laying the Groundwork. Scars Publications. 2009. Anthology Survival of the Fittest. Scars Publications. 2009. Anthology Empty Houses. Kendra Steiner Editions. 2009. Anthology Dark Matter. Scars Publications. 2008. Anthology Hope and Creation. Scars Publications. 2008. Anthology The Downtown Cafe. Erbacce-Press. 2008. Anthology Snow in Summer and the Playground is Closed. Scars Publications. 2008. Chapbook Chasing Screaming Monkeys w/o Any Clothes. Chapbook. d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t press. 2008. Scrawl. K3 Publications. 2006.
Erica Bernheim was born in 1974 in New Jersey, and grew up in Ohio and Italy. She holds a BA from Miami University of Ohio and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in 26, The Black Warrior Review, Bridge, The Canary, Gulf Coast, Volt, and other journals. Currently, she teaches literature and creative writing in the Chicago area, and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.
Oliver de la Paz was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in Ontario, Oregon. He has a B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Arizona State University. He has taught at Arizona State University, Gettysburg College, Utica College, and he currently teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, his work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, The Asian Pacific American Journal, North American Review, and elsewhere. His book of prose and verse, Names Above Houses, was a winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series and published by Southern Illinois University Press. His second book, Furious Lullaby, is the editor’s selection for 2007, published by Southern Illinois University Press.
JANE MEAD is the author of The Usable Field (Alice James, 2008) House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois, 2001) and The Lord and the General Din of the World, (Sarabande, 1996). Her poems appear regularly in literary journals and have been included in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, A Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages a vineyard in Northern California and teaches on occasion.
Uche Nduka was born on 14th of October 1963 in Umuahia, Nigeria. He earned a B.A Combined Honours degree in English from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1985. He has worked as the first Executive Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (1987-1989), National Publicity secretary of ANA (1992-1995), and Lecturer in African Literature at the University of Bremen (1995-2001; 2003-2007). He has lived in Holland, Germany and the USA. Nduka's volumes of poetry are Flower Child (1988), Second Act (1994), The Bremen Poems (1995), Chiaroscuro (1997) (winner of the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize), If Only the Night (2002), Heart’s Field (2005) and Eel on Reef (2007).
Carol Novack is former criminal defense and constitutional attorney who publishes the "edgy and enlightened" multimedia e-journal Mad Hatters' Review. A collection of her short writings, “Giraffes in Hiding,” will be published in 2010 by Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink. Works may or will be found in many journals, including 5_trope, Action Yes, American Letters & Commentary, Caketrain, Diagram, Drunken Boat, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, First Intensity, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Knock, La Petite Zine, LIT, MILK, Notre Dame Review, Otoliths, and Wheelhouse, and in several anthologies, including "Online Writings: The Best of the First Ten Years," "The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets," “Meanjin,” and “The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing.” Her CD Inventions II, with outrageously fine, custom-made music, is available for sale at CDBaby.
Jee Leong Koh is the author of two books of poems, Payday Loans and Equal to the Earth (Bench Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets and Best Gay Poetry, and in PN Review, as well as other journals. Born in Singapore, he now lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter (http://jeeleong.blogspot.com).
Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip, winner of the Spire Press Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009) and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009).
Born and raised in Bethlehem, PA (not far from the grave of H.D.), Matthew did his undergraduate work in Art History and English at Muhlenberg College and received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. Shortlisted for the National Poetry Series, the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and twice for the Walt Whitman Award, Matthew has received the Kay Deeter Award from the journal Fine Madness and three Pushcart nominations.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Canteen, Center, DIAGRAM, DMQ Review, Dusie, Ganymede, Hobble Creek Review, Knockout, Limp Wrist, Mantis, Memorious, Meridian, Michigan Quarterly Review, Midway Review, MiPOesias, OCHO, Oranges & Sardines, Ouroboros Review, Phoebe, qarrtsiluni, The Smoking Poet and elsewhere, including the anthology Best New Poets 2005.
Matthew lives and works in New York City.
John Dorsey currently resides in Toledo OH. His work has recently appeared in Underground Voices, Mystery Island Magazine, The James River Poetry Review, fearless, Poesy Magazine, Spent Meat, and the Dublin Quarterly. He is the author of ‘Little Boy Beat: Selected Poems’ published by Paladin M & E, Inc. in 2004. His collection ‘The Price of Sunshine’ co-authored with Iris Berry will be released in the near future by Feel Free Press.
Gudding was born in a Norwegian-American part of northwestern Minnesota. He spent his formative years in Moorhead, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota. At fifteen, Gudding moved with his family briefly to Iowa before settling in Washington state. Gudding attended The Evergreen State College, an experimental school in Olympia, Washington, Purdue University and Cornell University. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where he was hired to teach about "experimental" poetry writing and poetics. Gudding practices vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S. N. Goenka). A recipient of The Nation Discovery Award, Gudding received the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series, edited by Ed Ochester for his first book A Defense of Poetry. Gudding's second book of poetry, Rhode Island Notebook, was published in November 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press. Rhode Island Notebook is a four hundred thirty-six page poem interlarded with essays and the ubiquitous flotsam of quotidian awareness. It was written in Gudding's car on the highways between Normal, Illinois, and Providence, Rhode Island, during twenty-six roundtrip journeys, and has been called by the polymathic writer and artist Alan Sondheim, "the first 21st Century classic."
Beth Gylys is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has published two award-winning collections of poems: Bodies that Hum won the Gerald Cable First Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 1999; Spot in the Dark won the Journal Award and was published by Ohio State University Press in 2004. Her chapbook Balloon Heart won the Quentin R. Howard Award and was released by Wind Publications in 1997. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Antioch Review, Columbia Review and other journals, and she has had work in several anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation. Eds. Gerald Costanza and Jim Daniels, the 1996 Anthology of Best Magazine Verse, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets from 1951-1977.
Born with the breaking of metal and glass, I passed through an orifice like a TV screen Into the bright sheen of a media campaign Red white and blue red white and blue As I tumbled to the checkerboard floor in the hospital Where spin doctors picked me up and cooed “The truth. The truth. The truth,” they said, “Is that we love you, our sweet consumer.”
Rumor has it my garden is full of terror plots Tilled by nimble fingers that linger over vulnerable power plants And spots where scant defense lines are scratched in dry soil. Hot days are spent rubbing oil beneath straw hats Buzzed by military flybys Spies are everywhere Terror is everywhere Blooming like white convolvulus, weaving its way into desert sands Abrams are jammed in a bad gag commute Hands, tied by ticker tape news, Outline the rise (and fall) of the price of crude, Imply democracy while others pay our rent. Let’s portray sporadic resistance (Turn your head and cough) Then in the distance the bombs go off And everyone bows down to our (fallen) monument.
(Cue theme music)
Five years on with my umbilical still attached I come back to TV for warmth, Your glow of digital manipulation. Mama mama mama Don’t abandon this child Stay with me stay with me stay with me Keep me awake, keep me abreast With news breaks and shakes of paranoia Amid earthquakes and floods and the falling stars
Keep me safe in my shell Keep me safe in my shell Keep me safe in my shell.
Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1]
Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.
In the fall of 2005, Clayton and his wife Caryl were in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como, Italy, where he studied Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and wrote a 67 page work on the triptych in poetry and prose, "The Paradise of Alchemical Foreplay." For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied Ice Age cave art of southwestern France. In June
Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1]
Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.
In the fall of 2005, Clayton and his wife Caryl were in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como, Italy, where he studied Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and wrote a 67 page work on the triptych in poetry and prose, "The Paradise of Alchemical Foreplay." For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied Ice Age cave art of southwestern France. In Ju
Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook prize and the Bergin prize. After receiving his B.F.A. degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his M.A. degree from the University of Iowa.
He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968).
He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005), The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976).
His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. A Cave Canem graduate, her work has been awarded prizes such as the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, an International Publication Prize from The Atlanta Review, and honorable mention in the 2003 Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest. She has been published in journals such as Black Arts Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, The Belleview Literary Review,and The Banyan Review among others, as well as in the anthologies Growing Up Girland Gathering Ground. She is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn, a collection of undergraduate prose, poetry and drama, and her chapbook, Dawn In The Kaatskills, was published in April 2008 by Longshore Press.
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Penguin published Ghost Girl, her most recent book of poems, in 2004, and will publish her book Dearest Creature in October, 2009. Her previous twelve books include Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She received a Durfee Foundation Artists Award in 2002. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. In the late 1980s till the mid 90s she contributed monthly reviews to Artforum magazine. She does a variety of kinds of journalism, including art criticism and book reviews, and has written for the Village Voice, Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, Art and Antiques, and numerous other publications. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in catalogs for art exhibitions at museums and galleries including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, Indiana), and Brooke Alexander Gallery in NY, and CentrePasquArt in Switzerland. She is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont and she teaches in the graduate fine arts department at Art Center, College of Design in Pasadena, California, and in the Masters program in critical writing there. She has taught writing and/or art at the California Institute of the Arts, Cal Tech, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Southern California, the University of Utah, Pitzer College, and elsewhere. Text works of her have been performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
Charles Clifford Brooks III is a poet and novelist living in Georgia USA. He was inducted as a Master Member in the National Creative Society his senior year at Shorter College. There he also obtained a BS in History\Political Science with a minor in English Literature. His work can be seen in over 60 magazines, 4 anthologies, and printed in five foreign countries. Along with these projects he also freelances for two magazines and a newspaper. On occasion he pretends to write songs. Charles Clifford is currently Poetry Editor for Literary Magic Magazine. Ghost Shadow Press picked up his first book of poetry, “Whirling Metaphysics”, to be published in 2010.
Jason "Juice" Hardung's work has been published widely through the American underground. Appearing in The New York Quarterly, Zygote In My Coffee, Underground Voices, decomP, Thrasher, Lummox Journal, Heroin Love Songs, Polarity, Up The Staircase to name a few. He has a chapbook, Breaking The Hearts Of Robots out on Covert Press, and is completing The Broken and the Damned, a chapbook published by Epic Rites Press. He is co-editor of the Front Range Review and Matter Journal. Writing, for him, is something that soothes the savage beast, or whatever it's called. He is on probation for the next two years and hopes to have a novel done by then. He lives in Ft. Collins Colorado and loves it there, but doesn't like all the Subarus with kayaks strapped to the roofs, the earth tone sweaters, Teva sandals, or white kids in Reggae bands.
Randy Resh has been a prolific member of the Toronto poetry community; while he has published and performed his works throughout the community over the past decade, Resh was also instrumental in organizing the Gwendolyn MacEwen Memorial. While his primary poetic genres are romantic and erotic, Resh likes to work with free and experimental forms, with use of rhyme, alteration and neologisms. You can read three of his more recent works here: A Poet Should Be, Framed and Romantic. Currently working on the completion of two books, you can find out more about Randy Resh at poemhunter or view some of his performances on youtube.
Gemma June Howell was born in the Caerphilly Miners hospital in the South Wales Valleys, UK, in 1983, and went to live in Graig-Y-Rhacca, a small council estate in the Rhymney Valley. At the age of six she moved to Folkestone in England. In the predominantly upper-middle-class suburbs of Folkestone, Gemma was brought up in a single-parent family on benefits, and quickly learned the strict class-boundaries and her place in society. As a child, with her father’s encouragement, she became involved in political activism and attended Anti-Nazi League and ANC marches in London and Folkestone. Later, at Swansea University, 2002, an avid political activist, Gemma took part in the many ‘Stop the War’ and ‘Not in My Name’ demonstrations. At the age of 10, with an evidently ‘posh’ English accent, she moved to the working-class, post-industrial North of England, Whitley Bay in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Just when she began to lose the accent and become familiar with the Geordie twang, she moved back to Wales, at the age of 12. Back to her roots in Graig-Y-Rhacca, Gemma lived with her politically active grandmother, and her interest in politics grew: her passion for the people who lived in ex-mining community being a catalyst for her developing vehement views. While studying for her A-Levels, she represented her age-group at local Labour Party meetings and was Chairwoman of the school council for two consecutive years. Her first taste of political writing was at the age of 16 when she joined the Red Poets Society for Poems and Pints, and she’d frequent old men’s working clubs and pubs around the valleys to read her poetry. In 1999 she won second place at the Aber Valley Arts Competition for her poem, Fear of the Unknown. While studying Politics & Media at Swansea University, she set up The Creative Writing Coalition and produced poetry magazine, Think Allowed! Since completing her Creative Writing MA two years ago she’s had excerpts from her plays.. (hear full bio on air)
Eric Elshtain is finishing his Ph.D in the University of Chicago's Committee on the History of Culture. His work can be found in journals such as McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Interim, Salt Hill, GutCult and others. His latest chapbook, The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter, appeared last year from Transparent Tiger Press.
Christine, formerly a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry, lives in Brighton, Michigan. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such
as The Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review and have been selected for Poetry Daily and Best New Poets 2007. Her first book, Wild Flight, is available from Texas Tech University Press.
Christine Hume was born in 1968 and has lived in sixteen different States and countries. She is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize; Alaskaphrenia (New Issues 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; and Lullaby, a chapbook (Ugly Duckling Presse 2007) Her work has been included in anthologies such as Best American Poetry 1997 (Scribner), American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon2000), No Crossing Guards (University of Iowa 2004), Isn’t It Romantic? (Verse 2004), The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse 2005), and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande 2006), Not For Mothers Only (Fence 2007) and 12x12 (University of Georgia, 2008). Her work has been translated into German, Dutch, and Slovenian. In 2002, she was one of two Americans invited to an international festival, “Days of Poetry and Wine” in Slovenia; in 2006, she taught a poetry workshop in St. Petersburg for Summer Literary Seminars. She has written reviews and critical essays for a number of journals--Contemporary Literature, Rain Taxi, Chicago Review, Constant Critic--as well as for the American Poets in the 21st Century series (three volumes by Wesleyan 2002; 2006; 2009). The Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, Valaparisio Foundation in Spain, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire have awarded her residencies
Cate Marvin’s first book of poems, World’s Tallest Disaster, was awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinksy, and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The New England Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Slate, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is co-editor with Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, January 2006). Her second books of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande Books in 2007. Currently, she is an assistant professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
I'm a 34 year old machine operator. I live in a rural town on top of a mountain in Alabama. I've lived here with my wife and daughter, Gloria 11, and son, Jared, 6, for 12 years. I was born in Hammond, Indiana, just southeast of Chicago and lived in that area mostly for 22 years. I'm an eternally cynical Cubs fan. I've been writing for as long as I can remember and I started publishing in the small press back in 1994. I've racked up hundreds and hundreds of publication credits. I also write stories and articles that I sell to magazines like Hustler Fantasies and Swank, anthologies like the UKs Mammoth Book of Erotic Confessions and online sites Ruthies Club. I also write stories. Horror, humor, crime, have had some published in places like Spork, It's All Good (Manic D Press anothology) Thuglit, Plots With Guns, Night Terrors. many other places. My first chapbook collection, Playthings, was a collection of stories published by Kevin Sampsell's Future Tense press back in 2002. Since then I've had about eight chapbooks of poems published, the latest ones being Diminishing Returns by www.sunnyoutside.com and Industrial Strip by www.covertpress.com. Epic Rites will eventually be publishing my full length collection of short stories Blood and Greasepaint. and Grievous Jones will be publishing my first full length collection of poems, Red Star Ascending, at the end of the year. and somewhere between I have a 69 chapbook of erotica co-written with Melissa Hansen coming out from Tainted Coffee Press. I co-edit for Brian Fugett at www.zygoteinmycoffee.com where I also write a monthly column titled Observations of a Dumb Polack. I was involved with the inception of the GPP (they're a-holes and I'm glad I got out of there when I did) and I was an editor at Outsider Writers Guild (I'm glad I got out of there as well, but they're not a-holes).
Rob Plath is a 37-year old poet from New York. He’s been published in over 100 magazines and journals and is the author of four poetry collections: Ashtrays and Bulls (Liquid Paper Press), An IV Bag Full of Bile (Scintillating Publications 2007), Whiskey and Clay (Pudding Publications – forthcoming), and Tapping Ashes in the Dark (Lummox Press).
Kevin Prufer is the author of four books of poetry and the editor of three anthologies. He also serves as Editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, an international magazine of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews; Associate Editor of American Book Review; and Vice President/Secretary of the National Book Critics Circle.
Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Prufer received his undergraduate degree from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. He has graduate degrees from Hollins University and Washington University and currently lives in Warrensburg, Missouri with artist and literary critic Mary Hallab.
(And while you're on the internet, why not visit a few of Kevin's friends' websites, too: Richard Burgin, John Gallaher, Wayne Miller, Rose Marie Kinder,Alan Michael Parker, and Martha Collins are often up to interesting things.)
Katie Chaple is editor of Terminus Magazine and teaches writing at the University of West Georgia. Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, and others. Katie recently won Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for poetry.
James Harms is the author of five books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press, After West (2008), Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998), and Modern Ocean (1992), as well as a letter press, limited edition volume, East of Avalon (2000) from Caddis Case Press. The Joy Addict has just been reissued in the Classic Contemporary Series. His poems, essays and short stories have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Verse, The North American Review, Oxford American and many other literary journals; in addition, he is a contributing editor of West Branch.
Harms has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, fellowships from the West Virginia and Pennsylvania Arts Commissions and three Pushcart Prizes. He was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at West Virginia University, where he is currently Professor of English; he also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. Since arriving at West Virginia University he has been named a Benedum Distinguished Scholar, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher, and The Carnegie Foundation/CASE United States Teacher of the Year for West Virginia. During the spring semester of 2008 he served as Poet in Residence at Bucknell University. James Harms lives in Morgantown, West Virginia with his wife Amanda, and their children.
John Poch is poetry editor of the journal 32 Poems. His first book, Poems (Orchises Press), appeared in 2004. His work has appeared in many journals, and in 2004, he was a Howard Nemerov Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches at Texas Tech University.
David E. Oprava writes, because he has to. He is terrified of what will happen otherwise. It makes him prolific. He has been in over sixty journals online and in print and his first full-length book of poems VS. was released in October 2008 by Erbacce Press. He is also the founding editor of the tiny poetry press, Grievous Jones. When he isn’t writing he is battling against his raging sobriety and trying to live up to the high moral expectations of husbandhood, fatherhood, and humanhood. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily succeeding.
Dave Smith is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including, most recently, The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (Louisiana State University, 2000); Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry (University of Illinois, 1996); Fate’s Kite: Poems 1991-1995 (1996); Cuba Night (Quill, 1990); three books of criticism; and two works of fiction. Among Smith’s many honors are fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, an Award of Excellence from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, the Prairie Schooner Reader’s Award, and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for which he was twice a finalist. Smith is editor of the Southern Messenger Signature Poets series of Louisiana State University Press and for many years was co-editor of Southern Review. He is presently Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University and has previously taught at the University of Utah; the State University of New York at Binghamton; the Summer Creative Writing Program at Bennington College in Vermont; the University of Florida; Virginia Commonwealth University, and Louisiana State University. He taught Elizabeth Morgan and Gregory Donovan.
Alan Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poems: After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981), The Courtesy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Happy Hour (University of Chicago Press, 1987) which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Mixed Company (University of Chicago Press, 1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, The Dead Alive and Busy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University, Song and Dance, which Houghton Mifflin published in February, 2002, and which won the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, as did his next collection, Tantalus in Love (2205). His most recent book, Old War, appeared in 2008; and new book, Night of the Republic, is due out from Houghton Mifflin in 2011. Shapiro is the author of three books of prose, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1993), The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997, and Vigil (Chicago, 1997), a memoir about his sister’s death from breast cancer, and winner of the New England Bookseller’s Discovery Designation. The poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro has published (with Oxford) a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus and The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.
David Lehman grew up in New York City, the son of European refugees. His father came from Furth (near Nuremburg, in Bavaria); his mother in Vienna; they met in New York City and married in 1941.
After attending yeshiva (Jewish day school) and then Stuyvesant High Schhol, Lehman went to Columbia University. Upon graduating he spent two years in England on a Kellett Fellowship at Cambridge University. A second grant permitted him to live briefly in Paris. When he returned to New York, he became Lionel Trilling’s research assistant at Columbia, where he worked toward a PhD in English (1978). He left academe in 1981 to pursue a career as a freelance writer. He wrote articles and reviewed books regularly for Newsweek and often for other magazines and newspapers. In 1988 he initiated The Best American Poetry and continues as general editor of the annual anthology.
The most recent of Lehman’s books of poetry are Yeshiva Boys (Fall 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), both from Scribner. Both The Evening Sun (2002) and The Daily Mirror (2000) are “journals in poetry” consisting of poems from the five-year period when Lehman wrote a poem a day as an experiment. His earlier books include An Alternative to Speech (1986), Operation Memory (1990) and Valentine Place (1996). He has written six nonfiction books, most recently A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, Fall 2009). He is also the author of The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday), Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Simon and Schuster), and The Perfect Murder (University of Michigan Press), among other books of nonfiction.
Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003), and several other collections. In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan’
Franz Wright, the son of poet James Wright, was born in Vienna in 1953. During his youth, his family moved to the Northwest United States, the Midwest, and northern California. Wright's most recent collections of poetry include Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) which received a Pulitzer Prize, The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). He has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Wright has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Leonard Gontarek’s books of poems include Déjà Vu Diner (Autumn House, 2006), Zen For Beginners (Green Bean Press, 2000), and Van Morrison Can’t Find His Feet (My Pretty Jane Press, 1996). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2005, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, FIELD, Fence, Volt, and Exquisite Corpse. In 2005 he received poetry awards from Mudfish and the Mad Poets Society.
Gontarek has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and has twice received poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His work is forthcoming in The Autumn House Anthology of American Poems and Prayers. He has coordinated Peace / Works: Poets and Writers for Peace (2003—present) and The Philadelphia Poetry Festival (2002- 2003). He conducts poetry workshops at The Arts League in Philadelphia.
Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until 1981, when his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. Since then, he has lived in Boston, Buffalo, Rochester, Baltimore, Iowa City, New York, Bulgaria, Chicago, Cincinnati, Houston, Nebraska, and Cleveland. He is the author of My Soviet Union,, winner of the 2006 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the coeditor, with poet Cate Marvin, of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He is presently an assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he also serves as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Born in 1967 in Washington, DC, Matthew Zapruder is a widely published poet and translator, as well as the founder and Editor in Chief of the acclaimed poetry publishing house Verse Press (now Wave Books). His first book of poetry, American Linden, was the winner of the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize, and came out in 2002. His second collection, The Pajamaist, was released by Copper Canyon in 2006. His book of translations from the Romanian, Secret Weapon: The Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu, was published by Coffee House in 2007.
Zapruder lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. In May/June of 2007 he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa Texas, and he is a recipient of a 2008 May Sarton prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dobby Gibson’s first book of poetry, Polar, won the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Minnesota Book Award. He is also the author of a second collection of poetry, Skirmish. Gibson's poetry has appeared in many publications: Ploughshares, Fence, Iowa Review, New England Review, Conduit, and among other publications. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. He currently lives in Minneapolis.
Christopher Bakken was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1967. He is the author of two books of poetry: Goat Funeral, which was awarded the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry published in 2006; and After Greece, for which he was awarded the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry. He is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Houston. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in places like The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, PN Review, Boulevard, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Literary Imagination, Contemporary Poetry Review (www.cprw.com), and Modern Poetry in Translation. He served as aFulbright Scholar in American Studies at University of Bucharest, Romania, in 2008. He is an Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.
Dustin Brookshire is a poet and activist living in Atlanta, Georgia. He's the founder and editor of Limp Wrist, an online magazine with queer sensibility. Through Limp Wrist, Dustin has started a scholarship that is open to LGBT high school juniors and seniors. Dustin also keeps busy with such projects as Quarrel, Project Verse, a new anthology titled Queens of Poetry, and maintaining his blog, I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. His work has appeared in Ouroboros, OCHO, Subtle Tea, Atlanta Rainbow Muse, David, and he has received awards from state poetry societies. When Dustin is not working on poetry projects, he occupies his time with serving on the Atlanta Pride Committee as well as the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival Committee and keeping Georgia's elected officials on their toes. Besides reading Limp Wrist and I Was Born Doing Work in Sin religiously, Dustin wants you to read Beth Gylys's Bodies that Hum, Denise Duhamel's Kinky, and Marilyn Nelson's The Field of Praise: New and Selected Poems.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass). His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Cody Lumpkin was born and raised in Georgia. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing: Poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has served as a poetry editor for the Sycamore Review and a Program Associate for the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference. His work has appeared in New Orleans Review, New South, Tar River Poetry, South Dakota Review, and Verse Daily.
Cole Swensen received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Goest (Alice James Books, 2004); Such Rich Hour (2001); Oh (2000); Try (1999), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Noon (1997), which won the New American Poetry Series Award; Numen (1995); Park (1991); New Math (1988), which won the National Poetry Series competition; and It's Alive, She Says. Her translations of contemporary French poetry include Art Poetic (1999, by Olivier Cadiot), Natural Gaits (1995, by Pierre Alferi), Past Travels (1994, by Olivier Cadiot), and Interrmittances II (1994, by Jean Tortel). Her work as a poet and a translator has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a Contributing Editor for American Letters and Commentary and for Shiny, and is the translation editor for How2. Cole Swensen currently teaches at the University of Iowa.
Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. He received his B.A. from Harvard College. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are Girly Man (University of Chicago Press , 2006), With Strings (2001), Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (2000), Dark City (1994), Rough Trades (1991), The Nude Formalism (1989), Stigma (1981), Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, 1980), and Parsing (1976).
He is also the author of three books of essays, My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999), A Poetics (1992), and Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986). He has edited many anthologies of poetry and poetics including Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998) and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984, with Bruce Andrews).
Among his translations from the French are Red, Green, and Black (1990, by Olivier Cadiot) and The Maternal Drape (1984, by Claude Royed-Journoud). In the 1970s, Bernstein co-founded the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He has also written the librettos for a number of operas with composers such as Ben Yarmolinsky, Brian Ferneyhough, and Dean Drummond.
Bernstein serves as the Executive Editor, and co-founder, of The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo. His honors and awards include the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Matthew Baker Thompson resides in Buffalo, New York, which is far less snowy than the image in your head. He is the author of milquetoast.exe (2007) and Who knows? Nobody knows. (2008), both released by Bad Drone Media. His work has appeared in The Lanthorne and Elm Leaves. He was nominated to be a finalist in Artvoice's Best of Buffalo 2008, in the Best Poet/Spoken Word Artist category. He has never been named the World's Strongest Man. He maintains a website (matthewbakerthompson.com,) where he posts poems periodically. He works as an XML programmer for a technical consulting firm in Rochester, New York. Kim Chinquee is the author of Oh Baby (Ravenna Press), the forthcoming collection Pretty (White Pine Press) and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Online Writing: Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press). She lives in Buffalo, New York. Jennifer Campbell is an English Professor in Buffalo, New York, and co-editor of Earth’s Daughters feminist literary journal. Her poetry has appeared in Heart Lodge, Feile-Fiesta, Nerve Cowboy, Letterhead, Earth’s Daughters, Hudson View, Skyline Magazine, and Literary House. She received a Pushcart nomination in 2007 and her poem, “That Siren, Sleep,” appears in the anthology Mourning Sickness.
Irene Sipos is a native Buffalonian who completed her Masters in American Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo under Robert Creeley and Leslie Fielder. She is a full time lecturer in the College Writing Program at Buffalo State College. Irene is one of the original members of Buffalo State’s Rooftop Poetry Club where she has participated in several projects with her classes. Inspired by her interest in cooking, Irene recently offered a Rooftop workshop on food and poetry. Her work has appeared numerous times in local and regional publications and anthologies including the Buffalo News, Artvoice, The Buffalo Book of Poetry and Waging Words for Peace: Buffalo Poets Against the War. Her poem, “Thank You, Mr. Burchfield” is in the Winter/Spring 2009 edition of the Burchfield Penney Art Center Newsletter. Irene’s poetry has appeared nationally in Lilith magazine and as a finalist in the 2004 Awards Issue of The Comstock Review. Dennis Reed is a Web specialist at Buffalo State College's E. H. Butler Library, where he helps run the library's innovative Rooftop Poetry Club. He recently completed his master's degree in English literature. He lives in Buffalo, NY, with an uncertain number of cats. Rachel Johnson has lived in the Buffalo area all her life. Throughout her life, she has traveled to many parts of the U.S., Mexico, Canada, England, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Poland. She just graduated from Buffalo State College with a B.A. in English. If DNA will be published in NOMAD: art+word from the buffalo herd.
Gregory Fraser earned an M.F.A. in poetry at Columbia University, where he won the David Austen Best Manuscript Award, judged by former poet laureate Stanley Kunitz. In 1999, Fraser completed his Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Houston, where he was awarded the Donald Barthelme Prize and the James Michener Award for Poetry. A two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Fraser’s first collection of poems, Strange Pietà, was published in 2003 by Texas Tech University Press. His poetry has appeared in the Southern Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many other literary journals. He is the co-author, with Chad Davidson, of Poetry Writing: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). His second collection of poems, Answering the Ruins, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009. The recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fraser teaches English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia, in Carrollton, GA.
Chad Davidson is the author of /The Last Predicta /(2008) and /Consolation Miracle/ (2003), both on Southern Illinois UP, as well as co-author with Gregory Fraser of /Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches, /(Palgrave Macmillan 2009). He has work forthcoming or recently appearing in/ DoubleTake, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, /and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta.
Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser, both accomplished poets, come together on the Joe Milford Poetry Show to discuss their latest collaboration, Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches, /(Palgrave Macmillan 2009). This interview will be followed on 3/14 by a reading of Chad's poetry and on 3/15 by a reading of Greg's poetry. Two great poets--three great shows!
C. K. Williams was born in 1936 in Newark, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), which won the National Book Award; Repair (1999), winner of a Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969).
Williams has also published five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa) (1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978).
Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.
TINA CHANG is the author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Her poems have appeared in American Poet, Indiana Review, McSweeney's, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College.
Jerry Williams's entire family, on both sides, originated from Harlan, Kentucky, a coal town in the southeastern part of the "Bluegrass State," a place of great importance to labor historians and country singers. His ancestry consists mostly of alcoholics and pill addicts, xenophobes, agoraphobes, preachers, toothless Felliniesque pinheads, veterans of foreign wars with unidentifiable diseases, attempted murderers, moonshiners and bootleggers, racists, golfers, magicians, disability royalty, suicides, freemasons, and a legion of mourners. Before he arrived on the scene, his mother and father and his two sisters moved north to Dayton, Ohio, birthplace of African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, actor Rob Lowe, and sibling aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright. Over the years, he has been an infant; a child; an adolescent; an adult; a gym rat; an undergraduate at Vermont College, where he received a B.A. in English; singer in a band named after a Sam Shepard play; landscaper; typist; bartender; delivery driver (auto parts); cashier; telephone solicitor; dishwasher; librarian's assistant; Los Angeleno; San Franciscan; Princetonian; Tucsonan (he did an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Arizona); as well as a reluctant Stillwaterian, where he earned a Ph.D. in English with a creative dissertation at Oklahoma State University. After spending two years in Bristol, Rhode Island, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Roger Williams University, he settled in New York City. Currently, he lives in the Bronx and works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Witness, Pleiades, Hayden's Ferry Review, Barrow Street, Tin House, the new web version of Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review, and many others. His first collection of poems, Casino of the Sun, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February of 2003, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts
Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2008), Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2002), and of five published or forthcoming chapbooks: Arrow’s shadow (Equipage); Georgia (Katalanché), co-winner of the 1913 Prize; Roche limit (Track & Field); Bartleby’s Waste-book (Particle Series); and Masquerade (Vagabond). His work has appeared in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande), Walt Whitman hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point), The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (Iowa), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner). Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse), he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2, New German Critique, Australian Book Review, Religion and Literature, and elsewhere in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine). Zawacki has held other fellowships from the Salzburg Seminar (Austria), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Le Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), the Fulbright Foundation (Australia), the Rhodes Trust (England), the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Bread Loaf. He teaches at the University of Georgia.
Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta and teaches at Georgia State University, where he's finishing a PhD. in creative writing. He serves as production editor of New South and as fiction editor of Terminus Magazine. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in Weber: The Contemporary West, The Pedestal Magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, Zone 3, NANOfiction, Mud Luscious, and others. His short story 'Property of the Church' was adapted to film and premiered in New York City in 2002. His book reviews and interviews have appeared in Terminus Magazine, GSU Review, and ISLE. His poetry has appeared or is coming out in many magazines, including Descant, The Literary Review, Redactions, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Ecotone, The Redneck Review, and in the anthologies We Are What We Watch: Poets Respond to Television, Film, and Media and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes. He has finished a novel, 'Burnout,' about the Burning Man festival in Nevada; and a collection of poetry, 'The Donner Party Picnic Area.' Neither of them have yet found homes. He still has hope.
Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley. Received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Author of nine collections of poetry, including Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975). He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985). He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines. Some of the poems that deal explicitly with these incidents include "A Litany," "A Moment," and "Gathering the Bones Together," in which he declares: "I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my body." In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive." Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence.
Andrew Demcak (born in Silver Spring, Maryland)[1] is a poet, screenwriter, and the author of Catching Tigers in Red Weather, winner of the 2007 Three Candles Press open book award.[2] and |title= Zero Summer (Paperback), from BlazeVOX [Books] 2008. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/English from Saint Mary's College of California.[3]
Demcak's poetry is taught as part of courses at Ohio State University and Michigan State University.[4]
Atlanta native Collin Kelley is an award-winning poet, playwright and journalist. He is the author of After the Poison (2008, Finishing Line Press), Slow To Burn (2006, Metro Mania Press), Better To Travel (2003) and a spoken word album, HalfLife Crisis (2004). He is the recipient of a Georgia Author of the Year Award and was a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award and the Pushcart Prize. Kelley’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, MiPOesias, LocusPoint, Terminus, In Posse Review, Blue Fifth Review, New Delta Review, Chiron Review, poeticdiversity, The Pedestal, Welter, SubtleTea and the critically acclaimed anthologies, Red Light: Superheroes, Sluts & Saints (Arsenal Pulp Press) and We Don’t Stop Here (The Private Press, UK). He is also co-editor of the award-winning Java Monkey Speaks Anthology series (Poetry Atlanta Press). For more information, visit www.collinkelley.com.
Clayton Eshleman (born June 1 1935) is an American poet, translator, and editor. Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Recent publications include Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007), a collection of poems on art and artists, including Caravaggio, Leon Golub, Unica Zürn, Henri Michaux, Corot, Joan Mitchell, Henry Darger, African sculpture, Neolithic standing stones, and the Upper Paleolithic Chauvet Cave; and An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006). Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1] Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now
Clayton Eshleman (born June 1 1935) is an American poet, translator, and editor.
Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Recent publications include Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007), a collection of poems on art and artists, including Caravaggio, Leon Golub, Unica Zürn, Henri Michaux, Corot, Joan Mitchell, Henry Darger, African sculpture, Neolithic standing stones, and the Upper Paleolithic Chauvet Cave; and An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006).
Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1]
Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now
Laura McCullough’s second collection of poems, WHAT MEN WANT, is forthcoming from XOXOX Press (Nov. 2008) with blurbs by Hilda Raz, Denise Duhamel, and Kurt Brown, and her third, SPEECH ACTS, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her first, now out of print, THE DANCING BEAR, debuted in 06 with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn, Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. In 07, Mudlark published her chapbook of prose poems, ELEPHANT ANGER, and she won her second NJ State Arts Council Fellowship, this time in poetry; the first was in prose. She has an MFA in fiction from Goddard College. In 07, she attended the Summer Solstice Writers Conference, went to Bread Loaf again as part of the Social Staff, attended the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, Tusculum Review, Hanging Loose, Pebble Lake Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Iron Horse Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, The Pedestal, The Potomac, Nimrod, Boulevard, Tattoo Highway, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Hotel Amerika, Poetry East, The Portland Review, and others. Her book reviews have appeared in such places at Webdelsol Review of Books, The Potomac, and Small Spiral Notebook. Laura is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Essex where she is working on a dissertation on the development of mind in the writings of Stephen Dunn and his poetic lineage of Frost, Stevens, and Justice.
BJ Ward’s most recent book of poetry, Gravedigger’s Birthday, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His two earlier volumes are 17 Love Poems with No Despair and Landing in New Jersey with Soft Hands. All three volumes are published by North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA) and distributed internationally by Random House. As an Author: BJ Ward’s poetry has been featured on National Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” New Jersey Network’s “State of the Arts,” and the web site Poetry Daily, as well as in national publications such as Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Puerto Del Sol, Mid-American Review, Controlled Burn, The Sun, and dozens of other journals. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Worcester Review, and Teaching Artist Journal, as well as on the American Library Association’s main library advocacy web site (www.ilovelibraries.org) during National Library Week (April 13-19, 2008). Anthologies featuring his work that appeared recently include In A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press), The Poets of New Jersey (Jersey Shore Publications), The Random House Treasury of Friendship Poems (Random House), Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 (Santa Monica Press), and The Breath of Parted Lips II: Voices from the Frost Place (CavanKerry Books). One of his poems (“For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims”) has been cast in bronze and acquired as part of the permanent collection at Grounds for Sculpture, an outdoor sculpture museum in Hamilton, New Jersey. Mr. Ward is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for Poetry and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has also been awarded four full fellowships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to live and work at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has also received two full fellowships from the Artists/Teachers Institute, and served as University Distinguished Fell
Luc Simonic lives in Littleton. the real Littleton. not the unincorporated "Littleton" (where Columbine is)- rather, the Littleton with the abundant and white downtown holiday lights, webbed between tree limbs as long as Main Street. His daughter smiles at the sight - as driven by.
He encourages folks to go to his Facebook page's "about me" section for more information about him. Preface the Facebook trip with, "Besides my writing passions, Currently I'm involved in helping to edit the poetry for a 25 year old UK based magazine, Tears in the Fence. I also edit www. denversyntax. com's poems. The 16th issue is creation underway. Send me poems if you are led."
Luc has never had a chap book or book published, but enjoys reading his work and shootin' the bull on Joe's show.
Saturday, Luc can be quoted, "I have been a fan of Sarah Manguso for some time now, but need to buy her memoir."
Sarah Manguso is the author of the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney's Books, 2007), and the poetry collections Siste Viator (Four Way Books, 2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002).
Her memoir was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review, where it was called "a remarkable, clear-eyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful." The book was also declared Required Reading by the New York Post, which called it "chilling." Her story collection was a Readings (Australia) Book of the Year, and Elle declared it "risky, ruminative, and fiercely inward-dwelling." Manguso's poetry collections have been praised as "astonishingly good" by the American Book Review and "grim, desperate, and funny" by the Village Voice, which named The Captain Lands in Paradise a Favorite Book of the Year.
Her writing has been anthologized in publications including The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, The Better of McSweeney's, and three volumes of the Best American Poetry series. It has also appeared in Conjunctions, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
In 2008 Manguso was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She has taught literature and writing in Brooklyn College's SEEK Program and in the New School's Graduate Writing Program, and has given readings throughout the United States and Europe. Born and raised near Boston, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute.
Johannes was born and grew up outside of Lund, Sweden, but he has lived in the US for the past twenty years. Johannes translated Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg, published by Action Books last year. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, but I teach at Notre Dame.
Graduate of the UNCG MFA program, co-editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, and author of “Musings,” a weekly poetry column in Outlook, Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College. His first full-length collection of poetry, The Fractured World was published in August by Main Street Rag. He is also author of two chapbooks The Persistence of Faith (1993) from Sandstone Press and Deceptively Like a Sound (Dead Mule, 2008). A third chapbook, The Book of Days, will be published by Dead Mule in January. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize this year. His poem, “On the Days I Am Not My Father,” was recently featured on Garrison Keillor’s NPR show The Writer’s Almanac. Born in Greenwood, SC, he now lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches and coordinates the Poetry Hickory reading series.
Lisa Forrest is a Senior Assistant Librarian for SUNY College at Buffalo and the founding member of the school's Rooftop Poetry Club. She is the recipient of the 2008 Excellence in Library Service Award from the Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC). A 2007 Pushcart prize nominee, Lisa's poetry has appeared in a variety of local and national publications, including Artvoice, Buffalo News, eco-poetics, foursquare, Lake Affect, Not Just Air Literary eJournal, WordWrights, and Yellow Edenwald Field. Her essays have been featured on WBFO, Buffalo's local National Public Radio station. Lisa's first collection of poems, To the Eaves, is available from BlazeVox Books.
Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His chapbook, Hard Rain was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College.
Hoagland's other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry.
In 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters praised the poet's work with a citation stating, "Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild."
His poems and critical writings have appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and the 1991 Pushcart Prize anthology. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.
Dean Young (1955-) is a contemporary American poet in the poetic lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Though often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, his work also resonates with the Surrealist poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and if neo-surrealism has a poetic corollary then it is him. His most recent books are Elegy on Toy Piano and Embryoyo, the first of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Matt Hart is the author of Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and three chapbooks, Revelated (Hollyridge Press, 2005), SONNET, (H_NGM_N Books, 2006), and Simply Rocket (Lame House Press, 2007). A new collaborative chapbook with poet Ethan Paquin, Deafening Leafening, is forthcoming from Pilot Books in 2009. Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1969, Hart studied philosophy at both Ball State University and Ohio University before going on to receive his MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His poems, reviews, and essays have been published in numerous journals, including The Agriculture Reader, Conduit, Gulf Coast, The Harvard Review, Lungfull!, Ploughshares, and Spinning Jenny. Online his work can be seen in such journals as Coldfront, DIAGRAM, Fou, H_NGM_N, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Octopus, and TYPO. Six times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2003 for Best American Poetry, he was the 2007 John Ciardi Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as the 2005 Winter Residency Fellow at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 1995 he co-founded Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking and Light Industrial Safety, which he still edits and co-publishes, and which, this Spring, will celebrate the publication its 20th issue. A twenty year veteran of the punk rock/alternative music scene, his music has appeared in major motion pictures and on MTV. He currently plays in the experimental noise-poetry band Travel and the Go-Kart records pop-punk band, Squirtgun. He has lived in Cincinnati, Ohio since 1993 where he is an Assistant Professor in the Academic Studies Department at the Art academy of Cincinnati, a four year college of art and design. His wife Melanie teaches art at the Rees-Price Academy in Cincinnati Public schools. His daughter, Agnes, is two and thinks she's a hummingbird.