Poet Bios 2000-2010
David Baker is the author of nine books of poems: Never-Ending Birds, (forthcoming 2009, W. W. Norton), Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems (2007, Arc Publications, UK), Midwest Eclogue (2005), Changeable Thunder (2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991), Haunts (1985), and Laws of the Land (1981). A volume of his selected poems is being published in 2009 in Romania, in translation by C. Tanasescu, entitled Omul Alchimic (Alchemical Man). Baker’s three books of criticism are Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996).
Among his awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. His poems and essays appear in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and many others. Baker was raised in Missouri and currently resides in Granville, Ohio, where he serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. He teaches at Denison University and in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College..
Robert Fanning is the author of American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award 2003). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, and other journals.
A professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University, Fanning's writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award.
Kodac Harrison earned his BS from Ga. Tech and a MBA from Tulane. He has released 15 recordings on three different independent record labels. He was named “Best Local Poet” in 2008, and “Best Spoken Word Artist” in 2002, 2003, and 2004, by Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. He has co-edited three poetry anthologies. Kodac is chairman of Poetry Atlanta, and hosts the award winning Java Monkey Speaks in Decatur, Georgia.
Mark Halliday
Barbara Hamby's fourth book of poems is All-Night Lingo Tango (Pittsburgh, 2009). Her third book of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was also published by Pittsburgh.
Her first book, Delirium, won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize and two prizes for the best first book of poems published in 1995, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book of poems, The Alphabet of Desire, won the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry and was published by NYU Press in May 1999. The New York Public Library chose The Alphabet of Desire as one of the 25 best books of 1999.
She received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. She has also received three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Five Points, The Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Best American Poetry 2000 and 2009, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001.
She is married to David Kirby, and they teach in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida..
Robert Perry Ivey is from Macon, Georgia and has recently moved back from Tarrytown, New York where he completed his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Perry feels honored to be reading in the Poetry @ Tech reading series where he attended his first large poetry reading hosted by Tom Lux and Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dobyns, and Billy Collins nine years ago. Perry’s poems can be found in Lumina, The GSU Review, At-Large Magazine, and The Live Oak Review.
Allison Joseph is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003) and Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004). What Keeps Us Here was the winner of Ampersand Press' 1992 Women Poets Series Competition. It also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and Emerson College in Boston.
In addition, she was awarded Illinois Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry in 1996 and 2007 and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 1997. Currently she is an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where she serves as editor for Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop, a summer conference for high school-aged writers. Her sixth collection, My Father's Kites, will be published in 2010 by Steel Toe Books.
Thomas Lux was born in Massachusetts in December 1946. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon foundations, and the NEA. In 1994, he was awarded the Kinglsey Tufts prize for his book Split Horizon. The most recent of his 11 full-length collections is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). Currently, he is Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as on the MFA faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and Warren Wilson College.
Ginger Murchison assisted Thomas Lux in the founding of POETRY at TECH. Her chapbook Out Here was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has published articles, book reviews, and interviews, and her poems have appeared in recent publications of Horticulture, Atlanta Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine and several anthologies, including Volumes II and III of Java Monkey Speaks: A Poetry Anthology. Editor of the acclaimed Cortland Review, she lives with her husband Clyde Mynatt in Atlanta.
Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches a workshop in the graduate department at Manhattanville College. He is the author of six collections: his collection Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner and his chapbook won the Ledge Poetry Prize. His collection entitled Ready to Eat the Sky was published by River City Publishing as part of their new poetry series and was a finalist for an Independent Publishers Books Award. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts and has appeared in Verse Daily. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Valparaiso Review.
Khadijah Queen was born near Detroit and raised in Southern California. A Cave Canem Fellow and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Conduit, was published in 2008 under the Black Goat imprint at Akashic Books. Individual poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies including PMS: Poemmemoirstory, The Drunken Boat, /nor and Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press 2008). A chapbook, No Isla Encanta (2007), is available from dancing girl press. Khadijah has performed and exhibited internationally and curates an annual multi-genre reading series, Courting Risk, at Macaulay Honors College in New York City.
Currently, she is completing a second book of poetry and collaborating on a libretto incorporating video, music, dance and performance art. She is a graduate fellow in art studio with a focus on performance and installation at University of South Florida.
Chelsea Rathburn's first full-length collection of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University of Evansville Press. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Hudson Review, the Cincinnati Review, and Barrow Street, among other journals and anthologies. She is also author of a poetry chapbook, Unused Lines, published by Aralia Press in 2003. A native of Miami, Florida, she holds an MFA from the University of Arkansasand lives in Decatur
Bruce Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star .
Weigl's first full-length collection of poems, A Romance, was published in 1979. During the 1980s, Weigl published two more poetry collections, The Monkey Wars and Song of Napalm. In 1999, he published two more poetry collections, Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems and After the Others. He also published a memoir that year titled The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir. His most recent book is Declension in the Village of Chung Loung.
Many of Weigl's poems are inspired by the time he spent in the U.S. Army and Vietnam. In The Circle of Hanh, Weigl writes, "The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return...the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror." In addition to writing his own poetry, Weigl worked with Thanh T. Nguyen of the Joiner Research Center to translate poems of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers captured during war. Weigl and Nguten accepted an invitation from the Vietnamese Writers Association and traveled to Hanoi to receive assistance in translating the poems.
Weigl received a prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1979. He received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 for Arts and Creative Writing. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm, and in 2006 he was awarded the Lannan Literaruy Prize in Poetry. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies. Weigl additionally served as the president of the Associated Writing Programs. Weigl is a distinguished professor at Lorain County Community College.