Visiting Poet Biographies from Previous Years
Kim Addonizio is the author of three books of poetry from BOA Editions: The Philosopher's Club, Jimmy & Rita, and Tell Me, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Her latest collection, What Is This Thing Called Love, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2004. A book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure, was published by Fiction Collective 2. She is also co-author, with Dorianne Laux, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton). With Cheryl Dumesnil she co-edited Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (Warner Books).
Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06. Her new novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, has just been published by Simon & Schuster (July 07). She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and literary journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA.
Frank Bidart 's most recent full-length collections of poetry are Desire (FSG, 1997) and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award. He teaches at Wellesley College.
In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure—which now, with Star Dust, is finally complete.
In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth.
Frank Bidart Links
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/162 (More biographical information, poems and links)
http://wiredforbooks.org/frankbidart/ (Hear Frank Bidart Reading his work)
Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad and Tobago, a Cave Canem fellow and author of two collections of poetry, tarnish and Masquerade (Cypher Books 2006) and GULLY (Cypher Books 2009). Artistic Director and co-founder of the louderARTS Project, Roger is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion. He is poet in residence with VisionIntoArt, an inter-disciplinary arts ensemble. Roger has featured at major music and literary festivals, and universities throughout the world. He has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and the Mac-Neil Lehrer NewsHour. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Katie Chaple
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.
Travis Wayne Denton lives in Atlanta where he is the Associate Director of Poetry @ Tech and Editor of Terminus Magazine. He will complete his MFA at Georgia State University, where he also teaches, in December 2006. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and magazines such as Greensboro Review, Rattle, The South Carolina Review, The Baltimore Review, and many others. His work will also be featured in the upcoming anthology Evensong: Contemporary American Poems of Spirituality. He is a two-time nominee for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry Magazine, winner of a poetry prize from the Tulane Review and a writing award from Agnes Scott College Writer’s Festival. His latest manuscript is Leaving the Body Behind.
Travis Denton Links
www.Terminusmagazine.com
Cherryl Floyd-Miller is the winner of the 2002 Hughes, Diop, Knight Poetry Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Center in Chicago. She has held several writing fellowships and is a widely published poet and playwright. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Broad River Review, Terminus Magazine, storySouth, Poetry Midwest, Essence magazine and other literary journals and anthologies. Her latest work on the life of the late Gregory Hines appears in Poetry magazine.
Her first collection of poems, Utterance: A Museology of Kin, was a 2001 semi-finalist for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and a 2002 finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her second collection, Chops (Nexus Press, Oct. 2004) won a 2005 AIGA Gold SEED Award. Both literature and visual art, Chops is a part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Cherryl was the first Atlanta-based Poets & Writers grant recipient for the Readings/Workshops programs in 2005 and selected the first DIALOG Literary Fellow for the Fulton County Arts Council in 2004.
Cherryl's play, Settling Sophia, received its world premiere with New World Stage Theatre in her native state (North Carolina) in September 2003 and its Midwest premiere at Western Michigan University in October 2004. The play had a March 2006 run in Atlanta at the Southwest Arts Center.
Also a quiltmaker, Cherryl teaches at the Spruill Center for the Arts and the Marcus Jewish Community Center. She is a member of The Baobab Poetry Collective and Poetry Atlanta's Community Board.
Cherryl Floyd Miller Links
http://cherrylblue.tripod.com (Cherryl Floyd Miller’s homepage
Ross Gay's first book is called Against Which (CavanKerry Press). He has had poems published in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, among many others. Ross is a fellow with Cave Canem, a summer retreat for African American poets, in addition to having a Ph.D. from Temple University. He teaches at Montclair State University and is a basketball coach.
Regie Gibson is author of Storms Beneath the Skin, is the 1998 National Poetry Slam Champion and co-writer of the autobiographical film by New Line Cinema Love Jones. Regarded as one of the best performance poets in the world, Gibson has performed at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall, the Steppenwolf Theater, Harvard Universities Longfellow Hall, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in seven countries, most recently Havana, Cuba. Gibson has personally worked with Kahil El Zabar, composer of the score for the musical The Lion King, Viggo Mortensen of Lord of the Rings, Gwendolyn Brooks, The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Mark Strand, Kurt Vonnegut, Richie Havens, The Monks of the Drepong Gamong Monastery, members of the world famous AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Mos Def (Hip Hop artist) and David Murray (saxophonist with Miles Davis). Gibson was the Chicago Tribune ‘Artist of the Year for Excellence’ for his poetry and is widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals, including The Spoken Word Revolution with poet Thomas Lux and most recently the Iowa Review. About Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut has written, “Regie, you sing and chant for all of us. Nobody gets left out.” The American Library Association Booklist wrote, “Gibson's poems are rich in archetypes with a cosmic sensibility, and when he does turn his gaze to the outer world, he writes with clarity, wit, and warmth,” about Storms Beneath the Skin.
Karen Head is the author of Sassing (WordTech Press, forthcoming 2009), My ParisYear (All Nations Press,
forthcoming 2008) and Shadow Boxes (Nations Press, 2003). Her poetry
appears, or is forthcoming, in a number of national and international journals
and anthologies, and she has been invited to present her work in the U.S. and
Europe. As a scholar of contemporary American poetry, she has begun to explore
the connections between traditional text-based poetry and digitally-enhanced
poetry, an exploration that involves her in a number of creative projects being
conducted in the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech. Her first digital
poetry project, Poetic Rub, was featured at the E-Poetry 2007 festival
in Paris. Head is the Graduate Communication Coordinator and Special Advisor
to the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech.
Additionally she serves on the Poetry Atlanta Board, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting poets and promoting poetry in the Atlanta area. She founded and is developing The Peachtree Review as a venue for both traditional and digital poetry.
Andrew Hudgins has published five books
of poetry with Houghton Mifflin: Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass
Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Strangers (1985). Ecstatic in the Poison was published by The Overlook Press/Sewanee Writers’ Series in 2003. He’s
also the author of a collection of literary essays, The Glass Anvil,
which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. Saints
and Strangers was one of three finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in
Poetry; After the Lost War received the Poets’ Prize in 1989,
and The Never-Ending was one of five finalists for the National Book
Award in 1991.
His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The
Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate,
and The Southern Review. His literary and personal essays have appeared
in The American Scholar, The Chicago Review, The Hudson
Review, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The
Washington Post Magazine, and other journals.
Hudgins was a Guggenheim Fellow is 2004, as well as a Wallace
Stegner fellow at Stanford University (1983-84) and the Alfred C. Hodder fellow
at Princeton University (1989-90), and he has received fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1986, 1992) and the Ingram Merrill Foundation
(1987). In 1997, he received both the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the
Ohioiana Poetry Award for lifetime contribution to poetry in Ohio. He was awarded
the Hanes Prize for poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1995,
and in 1988 he received the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters.
Andrew Hudgins joined the faculty of Ohio State University
in 2001 as a professor of English. He is currently Humanities Distinguished
Professor in English. Prior to coming to Ohio State, Hudgins taught at the University
of Cincinnati from 1985 to 200, and in 1999 he was named Distinguished Research
Professor. In 1996, he served as the Coal Royalty Professor of English at the
University of Alabama. In 1999 and 2000 he was a Visiting Professor of Creative
Writing in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught
at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ropewalk Writers’ Conference,
the West Chester Writers’ Conference, and the Indiana Writers’ Conference.
Hudgins received an A.B. in English and history from Huntingdon College in 1969, an M.A. in English from the University of Alabama in 1976, and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1983.
“No one has made dialect sound so regal,” writes poet Daniel Roop. Creative Loafing describes him: “a lanky African-American man with arms that stretch and sweep as his stories unfold.” And this native Atlantan word musician, M. Ayodele Heath, has unfolded his stories of Southern identity on stages from Atlanta to South Africa. Ayodele, whose name means, a joy arrives in the house, has held fellowships at the Caversham Centre for Writers in South Africa and Summer Poetry at Idyllwild, California. Other awards include: WPBA Lexus Leader for the Arts, two-time Southeastern Regional Slam Champion, and Atlanta Bureau for Cultural Affairs Emerging Artist of the Year. Recently featured in TurnerSouth’s MySouth television ad campaign, Ayodele has also been featured at such venues as: the Turner Trumpet Awards, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the National Black Arts Festival, the University of Michigan, Music Midtown and the Alliance Theatre. Among Ayodele’s publications: Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, and Chattahoochee Review, and the anthology, Poetry Slam: the Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. He is presently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at New England College.
Ayodele Links
www.ayospeaks.com (Ayodele Heath’s homepage)
www.storysouth.com/spring2004/gospelqueenjames.html (work by Ayodele)
Kodac Harrison is originally from Jackson, Ga. and received a BS from Ga. Tech and a MBA from Tulane. He then traveled to California and started a career as a musician. He has released 13 recordings on two different independent labels, with his last three studio recordings containing spoken word. He has made 6 tours of Europe and has performed for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and for Andrew Young and Ray Charles. In the fall of 2004, he performed at the Prague International Jazz Festival. He has introduced and sang with Patti Smith. In 2002, 2003, and 2004, Kodac was named “Atlanta’s Best Spoken Word Artist” in Creative Loafing. He is Atlanta’s current Slam Master and hosts the award winning Java Monkey Speaks.
Kodac Harrison Links
www.kodacharrison.com
Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry, from Slam to Hiphop, from performance poetry to spoken word. Dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and “the best poetry MC in the world,” (San Francisco’s Poetry Flash). His latest collection of poems, a collaboration with Chuck Close, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, was first exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the Venice Biennale and will be published by Aperture fall 06. The TV series he produced for PBS, “The United States of Poetry,” won the INPUT, International Public Television Award; he founded Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first ever major spoken word label, in 1995; and ran the infamous poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café from 1988-1996. He is currently Visiting Professor of Writing at the Columbia School of the Arts, Founder/Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, and Artistic Director of Study Abroad on the Bowery, a certificate program in applied poetics.
Bob Holman Links
www.bobholman.com (Bob Holman’s homepage)
Major Jackson’s books of poems are Hoops (2006, Norton) and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press). He has published poems in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road, Triquarterly, and other magazines. He received a Whiting Fellowship in 2003. A member of the famed Dark Room Collective, Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He teaches at the University of Vermont and is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Currently, he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Major Jackson Links
www.majorjackson.com (Major Jackson’s homepage)
http://www.postroadmag.com/Issue_2/Poetry2/P.jackson.2%20POEMS.html (Poems by Major Jackson)
Mark Jarman is Centennial Professor of
English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A graduate of the
University of California, Santa Cruz (B.A., 1974) and the University of Iowa
(M.F.A., 1976), he is the author of nine books of poetry: North Sea (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978), The Rote Walker (Carnegie-Mellon
University Press, 1981), Far and Away (Carnegie-Mellon University Press,
1985), The Black Riviera (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), Iris (Story Line Press, 1992), Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press,
1997), Unholy Sonnets (Story Line Press, 2000), To the Green Man,
(Sarabande Books, 2004), and Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007). With
David Mason, he has edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press, 1996).
Jarman's awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for
his poetry in 1974, three NEA grants in poetry in 1977, 1983, and 1992, and
a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for
1991-1992. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics
Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the
Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.
His poetry and essays have been published widely in such periodicals and journals as The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Southern Review. During the 1980's he and Robert McDowell founded, edited, and published the controversial magazine The Reaper. The Reaper Essays, published by Story Line Press in 1996, collects the essays they wrote together for The Reaper. Two collections of Jarman's own essays have been published: The Secret of Poetry from Story Line Press in 2001 and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry from the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series in 2002
A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise published by Tia Chucha Press in 2001, which won a 2002 Pen/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A published by WW Norton Co. in 2004, for which he was awarded a 2004 Whiting Writers Award and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He also received a Pushcart Prize in 2006. His new book, Quantum Lyrics, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former
Soviet Union, now Ukraine, in 1977, to Jewish parents who had prospered against
long odds: His paternal grandfather had been killed by Stalin, his grandmother
sent to Siberia, and his father stolen from an orphanage and raised by an uncle.
Kaminsky lost his homeland at age 16, after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
when rampant crime, inflation and anti-Semitism forced the family to seek political
asylum in the United States. They arrived in Rochester, New York in 1993, not
speaking a word of English. Six years later, Ilya was a Georgetown University
graduate and the youngest writer-in-residence ever appointed at Phillips Exeter
Academy in New Hampshire.
Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Dancing In Odessa was named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2005 by ForeWord Magazine. Kaminsky, a recipient of the 2005 Whiting Writer's Award, given to emerging writers with one published book. In 2001 Kaminsky was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship by Poetry magazine. He has also received the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, the Milton Center's Award for Excellence in Poetry, and the Southeast Review's first annual chapbook award for Musica Humana. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Tikkun, Southeast Review, and numerous other publications
David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and the author of The House of Blue Light and The Ha-Ha, both selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poets series published by Louisiana State University Press. He has two books forthcoming in 2007, The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems and an essay collection entitled Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa Of Avila, And 17 Other Colossal Topics Of Conversation. His work appears regularly in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
Martin Lammon Links:
http://al.gcsu.edu/lammon.htm (Georgia College and State University)
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16223 (An early interview with Martin Lammon)
M.L. Liebler is the author of several books of poetry including the 2001 Finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of The 2001 Wayne State University Board of Governors’ Award for Written In Rain: New & Selected (2000) and The Moon A Box (New Issues Press 2004) which received The 2005 Paterson Poetry Award of Excellence. Much of his work has been published in both national and international journals and reviews, and he has recorded CD’s of poetry and music with such well known musicians as Al Kooper, Country Joe McDonald, Jorma Kaukonen, Mike Watt, Professor Louie & The Crowmatix and his own Magic Poetry Band. In addition, he has read and performed his poetry extensively in Russia, China, Israel, Europe, Britain, Mexico and most of The United States. In 2005, he was named The First Poet Laureate of St. Clair Shores, Michigan (his hometown), and he is the Founding Director of The Writer’s Voice Project and the recent Metro Detroit Writers Literary Organization. He has taught English, Creative Writing, World Literature, American Studies and Labor Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980.
M.L. Liebler Links
http://www.mlliebler.com
In addition to having been on the writing faculties of the country's most prestigious M.F.A. and Creative Writing Programs (Columbia University, Boston University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Houston, and the University of California, Irvine, among others), Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty-seven years, the last nineteen of which, he was director of its M.F.A. Program in Poetry. Lux has published ten books of poems, most recently The Cradle Place, and seven Limited Edition books that have earned him, among other awards and prizes, the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and three from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been further honored with the Bank of New York Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2003, Lux was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emerson College, Boston.
Books of Poetry by Thomas Lux:
1. Memory's Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972)
2. The Glassblower's Breath (Cleveland State, 1976)
3. Sunday (Houghton Mifflin, 1979)
4. Half Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
5. The Drowned River: New Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)
6. Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)
7. The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems 1970 - 1975 (Adastra Press, 1996)
8. New and Selected Poems: 1975 - 1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)
9. The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
10. The Street of Clocks, British Edition (Arc Publishing, 2003)
11. The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)
Thomas Lux Links
Poems by Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux in Ploughshares
Listen to a Thomas Lux interview on The Paula Gordon Show
Taylor Mali is a teacher and voiceover artist. A classically trained Shakespearian actor, Mali was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. He is a four-time national champion of the national poetry slam and the author of What Learning Leaves and several spoken word CDs and DVDs. He lives and writes in New York City.
Taylor Mali Links
www.taylormali.com
Marty McConnell received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a director of the louderARTS Project, a New York City-based literary nonprofit. She appeared on the second and fifth seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, is one-fourth of the all-female performance poetry troupe The Piper Jane Project, and has represented New York City on six National Poetry Slam teams. She performs and facilitates workshops at schools and festivals around the country, including the Dodge Poetry Festival, Connecticut Poetry Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Cornell University, the University of Utah, James Madison University, University of Connecticut, University of Arkansas, DePaul University, and more. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including Women of the Bowery, Word Warriors, Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, Will Work for Peace, In Our Own Words: Poetry of Generation X, Fucking Daphne and the forthcoming Women.Period (Spinster’s Ink) and Appleseeds (Sacred Fools Press) anthologies, as well as journals including Rattle, Rattapallax, Fourteen Hills, Boxcar Poetry Review, Thirteenth Moon, 2River View, Lodestar Quarterly, and Blue Fifth Review. Her poem “marrying the violence” was selected as one of twenty poems to comprise the 2007 “Best of the Net” Anthology.
Tech BIE, Harvard MBA, exchange student at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, Germany, and a Lieutenant, USN, on the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, H. Bruce McEver founded Berkshire Capital Corporation in l983, pioneering the concept of providing independent merger, acquisition, and strategic advisory services for investment managers and securities firms. Bruce came to BCC from Paine Webber Group, Inc., where he served as Assistant to the Chairman after Paine Webber acquired Blyth Eastman Dillon, Inc., where he was Vice President for mergers and acquisitions. McEver began his career as a venture capital analyst at Bessemer Securities, Inc., and prior to that was Assistant Vice President, Corporate Finance, at Chemical Bank. A member of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, Bruce is a dedicated conservationist, a passion he demonstrates firsthand in preservation efforts on behalf of natural woodlands, beginning at home on his own 'Utopia Farm' in Salisbury Connecticut. "While industrious and ambitious, a corporate man, he is a great listener, an introspective, quiet, gentle soul--qualities that rarely exist side by side in one person," says longtime friend Jean Robertson, wife of Bruce's Tech roommate, John Robertson.
Bruce started writing in workshops in New York City with Hugh Seidman, Pearl London, Katha Pollitt, Brooks Haxton, David Lehman, and J.D. McClatchy. He has taken writing seminars at Sarah Lawrence College with Thomas Lux and Kevin Pilkington and, most recently, was a summer residency student at the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where he worked with Stephen Dobyns. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Westview, The Berkshire Review, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Atlanta Review . He works in New York City and lives in Salisbury, Connecticut on Utopia Farm.
Other links to information about Bruce McEver and his work:
About Bruce McEver
His Poem "Horus" in The Cortland Review
Award-Winning IEs
Gregory Orr
Gregory Orr Links
http://www.wooster.edu/ArtfulDodge/interviews/orr.htm (An interview with Gregory Orr)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5221496 (Gregory Orr on NPR)
Ed Pavlic’s next book is a prose-poetic photo essay set on a dhow amid the islands off the coast of Kenya, but here are small clear refractions (Kwani? Books, Nairobi, 2008). His other books of poems are Winners Have Yet to be Announced : A Song for Donny Hathaway, an epic poem centered in the life and music of soul singer Donny Hathaway (UGA Press, 2008), Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006) which was short listed for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue which won The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award in 2001. He’s also author of the critical study of African-American modernism, Crossroads Modernism (U Minn P, 2002). For years he traveled the country working as an itinerant construction laborer; he was the founding managing editor of The Madison Times, Madison Wisconsin’s weekly newspaper devoted to the black community. He has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University, St. John’s College (York, UK), and Union College as well as in poetry workshops at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Kwani? Literary Festival in Kenya. His awards include the Darwin Turner Memorial Prize from African American Review, the The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, and the Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He now lives in Athens, Georgia where he directs the MFA / PhD Program in Creative Writing and teaches at the University of Georgia.
Tania Rochelle is the poetry editor for The Chattahoochee Review. Her poems have appeared widely in print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, Iris, Rattle, and New York Quarterly. She received her English degree from the University of Georgia and graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Her first book, Karaoke Funeral, was winner of the 2003 Violet Reed Haas Prize, published by Snake Nation Press. Tania teaches creative writing at Portfolio Center in Atlanta and lives with her family in Marietta.
Tania Rochelle Links
www.snakenationpress.org/rochelle.html (book information)
www.thedrunkenboat.com/trochelle.html (poems by Tania Rochelle)
www.threecandles.org/archive/trochelle2.html (poems by Tania Rochelle)
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, My American Kundiman (Persea Books) and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books), winner of the Asian American Writers Workshop Members Choice Award. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including North American Review, The Literary Review, Brevity, and The Beacon Best.
Patricia Smith , lauded by critics as “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” is the author of four acclaimed poetry volumes—Teahouse of the Almighty (a 2005 National Poetry Series selection), Close to Death, Life According to Motown and Big Towns, Big Talk. Her poetry has been published in The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other literary journals/anthologies, and performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center, the Sorbonne in Paris and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland.
A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam, Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott.
In addition to her poetic works, Smith is also the author of Africans in America, a companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS documentary; Publishers Weekly called the book “a monumental research effort wed with fine writing…ultimately shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative,” and Michelle Cliff of the San Jose Mercury News said, “With its vivid language and historical integrity, ‘Africans in America’ is a major contribution to this country’s written history.” Smith also penned the children’s book “Janna and the Kings,” which won Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Award.
Smith is currently at work on Fixed on a Furious Star, a biography of Harriet Tubman to be published by Crown; also upcoming is a new poetry volume, 34, centered around the human devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and a young adult novel, The Journey of Willie J.
She has served as the Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University, writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and faculty member at the Cave Canem retreat for African-American writers.
John Skoyles has published four books of poems, A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and most recently, The Situation. His work has appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Slate, Yale Review and The Poetry Anthology, 1912 – 2002, among others. He is also the author of two books of prose, Generous Strangers, a collection of personal essays, several of which were broadcast on public radio; and a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education. His awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and Warren Wilson College, where he directed the MFA program. He is currently Professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department of Emerson College, and the poetry editor of Ploughshares.
David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras.
Jonida Beqo a.k.a. Gypsee Yo is a native of Tirana, Albania, currently residing in Atlanta, Ga. She received her B.A. in Theatre from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, where she founded Lighthouse Productions, an independent theatre company dedicated to original works that educate about and empower communities in crisis. In 2003 the American College Theatre Festival and the Kennedy Center for the Arts recognized Jonida’s one-woman show “The Women I Know” with the Dell’Arte Diversity Award. She has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Mehr Licht!, Java Monkey Speaks Anthology, Her Circle Ezine , Estrology, as well as in a series of periodicals in Albanian. Jonida is the author of three poetry collections in her native tongue, and of four audio CD collections in English, including Kitchensinkdrama, and Firstborn Daughters. As Gypsee Yo , she performs internationally as a spoken word artist, and has competed in slams worldwide, including National Poetry Slam 2006 and 2007, Individual World Poetry Slam 2006, and the first ever Women of the World Poetry Slam 2008. Jonida is a devoted wife, a doting mother, and a passionate teacher.
Born in 1970, Kevin Young is widely regarded
as one of the leading poets of his generation, one who finds meaning and inspiration
in African American music, particularly the blues, and in the bittersweet history
of Black America. Lucille Clifton says of Young, “[His] gift of storytelling
and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates
for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American."
His newest book is For the Confederate Dead, published in January 2007.
His earlier collection, Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by Kevin
Young is a "film noir in verse," a playful homage to the language
and imagery of Hollywood detective films. The title, Black Maria, is
vintage street slang for "police van" and "hearse," as well
as the name of Thomas Edison's first film studio. The poems follow the adventures
of two characters, the private eye A. K. A. Jones, and the femme fatale Delilah
Redbone, through "a maze of aliases and ambushes, sex and suspicions, fast
talk and hard luck…"
Young was a 1993 National Poetry Series winner for Most
Way Home, a volume of meditations on racism, slavery, poverty, and the
meaning of "home" in the collective memory of African Americans. Most
Way Home also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award of Ploughshares magazine. Other collections include To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor (2001), a poetic tribute to painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,
and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets;
and Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), a finalist for both the National Book
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Young's poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He is currently a Professor of Poetry at Emory University.