Visiting Poet Biographies from Previous Years
“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)
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)
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
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.
Ross Gay Links
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.
Regie Gibson Links
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)
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.
Van Jordon Links
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.
David Kirby Links
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
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
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)
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)
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.
Patrick Rosal Links
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.
Patricia Smith Links