Terry Blackhawk

The Dropped Hand

Terry Blackhawk’s poetry collections include Trio: Voices from the Myths (Ridgeway Press); Body & Field, (MSU Press); Escape Artist (BkMk Press), winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize; and a Greatest Hits chapbook from Pudding House Press. Blackhawk’s poems have appeared in many journals with reviews of her books in Calyx, Poet Lore, Booklist, ForeWord and American Book Review. In 1990 she was named Michigan’s Creative Writing Teacher of the Year. In 1992-1993 she received a National Endowment for the Humanities sabbatical award to study Emily Dickinson and later published several articles in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press). In 1995, while still teaching for Detroit Public Schools, she founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a writers in schools organization. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, an artist-in-residence grant from Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Governor’s Award for Arts Education, a Detroit Metro Times Progressive Hero Award and the United Black Artists Pioneering Teacher in the Arts Award. Terry Blackhawk is a graduate of Antioch College. She holds a Ph.D. in Reading and Language Arts Education from Oakland University and is a founding board member of WITSA, the national Writers in the Schools Alliance.

Derick Burleson

Never Night

Derick Burleson's first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and lives with his partner and daughter in Two Rivers, Alaska."Never Night" is a hymn to life, a meditation on day and night, on the seasons, on nature and on love. Alaska may be real chilly in the winter but these beautiful poems are more than warm. Apparently poetry can change climate... Adam Zagajewski

"Derick Burleson is a thoughtful and deeply observant poet, who has travelled far: to Rwanda, from where he wrote his first book, and in this book, to Oklahoma, Montana, and the Alaskan interior, never night and endless night. In the endless night, his prophet says '...and the world will grow/ rife with strange green fire...' -- and in this book, the world grows fiery with many other births, in consciousness and in the flesh, seen and said." Jean Valentine

Peter Conners

Emily Ate the Wind

        Peter Conners (www.peterconners.com) is editor of PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books, 2006), founding co-editor of the literary journal, Double Room, and a contributing editor to Del Sol Review. His third collection of poetry and prose, Of Whiskey and Winter, is forthcoming from White Pine Press. His poetry and prose appear in such journals as Mississippi Review, Fiction International, American Book Review, Salt Hill, and, in several anthologies. He lives in Rochester, NY where he works as Editor/Marketing Director for the literary publisher BOA Editions.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

The Blue City

Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in 1965. He is the author of nine books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca , a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Except by Falling winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize from Mesa State College. His last book Broken Hallelujahs was released by BOA Editions in September 2007. His awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. Known for his electrifying performances, he has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He received an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and lives in Erie, PA where he teaches writing workshops.

Robert Fanning

The Seed Thieves

In addition to The Seed Thieves, Robert Fanning is the author of Old Bright Wheel, winner of the Ledge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, his writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award. His work has also been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, America, The Ledge, and Artword Quarterly. He is the Program Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which brings professional writers into the classrooms of the Detroit Public Schools. He is a resident of Ferndale.

        “Passionate and accomplished — this poet’s ear is beautifully tuned — The Seed Thieves is an urgent, nervous, tender, and brilliant first book. Read it for joy!”
—Tomas Lux, author of The Street of Clocks and The Cradle Place

        “Turning away from this morning’s headlines to Robert Fannings’ book I feel that someone has steadied my shoulders, and for a while I walk in the holy light of sanity — through charred buildings, yes, in and out of broken-hearted familes and urban traffic, the awful billboards and births and deaths, "the intricate architecture of rubble" that is our lived lives. But the voice guiding me is clear, and the hand on my shoulder sure. It’s a quality we used to call "character", a quality of soul, that keeps me turning the pages. When I look up from the book I see through the window I hadn’t noticed all morning: outside the returning birds are industrious as ever — and singing.”
— Marie Howe, author of The Good Thief and What the Living Do

        “Robert Fanning’s poems originate from some uncanny place between a fevered imagination and a keen intellect. They are musical, dangerous poems — both sparing and wild. This poet searches for language and meaning in a mysterious world. What the poems offer, instead, is more mystery. More dream. More strange and lovely imagery and music. Robert Fanning is the real thing — a brave traveler in the sensory world, the subconscious, the realms of the dead and the very-much-alive — and he has emerged with these brilliant, startling, compelling poems”.
—Laura Kasischke,author of Fire and Flower and Gardening in the Dark.

Katie Ford

Storm

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition (2002) and Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008).Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, Poets & Writers, American Literary Review and Pleiades. She is poetry editor of the New Orleans Review and currently teaches at Reed College.

James Hart III

White Holes

        James Hart III, of Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood, is the curator of the Zeitgeist poetry series and the author of the watchable book (Weightless Press, 2003). His work has also appeared in the Café Review, Wayne Literary Review; Dispatch Detroit, Volumes 6 and 7; pasttentspress.com and thedetroiter.com.

        

Kawita Kandpal

Folding a River

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

The Fortunate Islands

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of six chapbooks: A Camellia for Judy (Frith Press, 1998), Feather's Hand (Swan Scythe Press, 2000), To a Small Moth (Poet's Corner Press, 2001), Susan Kelly-DeWitt's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2003), The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2005 ), and Cassiopeia Under the Banyan Tree (forthcoming, September 2007), as well as a letterpress collection, The Book of Insects (Spruce Street Press, 2003). Her work has been included in national and regional anthologies such as Claiming the Spirit Within (Beacon Press), I’ve Always Meant To Tell You, Letters to our Mothers (Pocket Books), Things I Never Said, An Anthology of Letters to Fathers (Story Line Press), O Taste and See (Bottom Dog Press) and Highway 99 (Heyday Books), and Words and Quilts (Quilt Digest Press, 1996); her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, North American Review, Rosebud, Cutbank, Nimrod, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Iris, Comstock Review, Oxymoron, Yankee, Runes, Poet Lore, Smartish Pace, Poetry Southeast, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Quarterly, Hawaii Review and Passages North, among many others. Her short story “The Audience” is forthcoming as an illustrated chapbook (Spring 2007) from Uptown Books. She has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and has won a number of awards, including The Chicago Literary Award from Another Chicago Magazine, the Bazanella Award for Short Fiction and a number of Pushcart nominations. Her essays, interviews, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Poetry Now, Small Press Review, Perihelion and Gardening at a Deeper Level (Garden House Press, 2004). She is currently a part-time instructor for Sacramento City College and the University of California, Davis Extension. The Fortunate Islands is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Joshua Kornreich

The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars

        Joshua Kornreich (www.joshuakornreich.com) leads a dual life, balancing his time as a fiction author with his decade-long career as an investment analyst. He grew up in Long Island and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree. He currently lives and works in New York City. The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars is his first novel.

Robert Lipton

A Complex Bravery

 

       Robert Lipton (http://robertlipton.blogspot.com/) is the author of Bearing Witness in the Promised Land. In: Live from Palestine (South End Press). His stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals, both on and offline, including Echo 681, Interbang, Jacaranda Review, Squaw Valley Review, King Log, Shades of Contradiction, The Texas Observer and Parthenon West. He has received grants from Berkeley Community Arts and Alameda Community Arts Programs, was for seven years poetry workshop leader at Berkeley Art Center.

        “ This is the book of childhood, love and war. Lipton’s poems are a gang that takes no prisoners: his voice is direct, his tone is clear, his diction is ironic — but his irony is earned and felt-through. The manuscript is a book of elegies that refuse to go mourning without at least a little bit of protest. Whatever his loss is, Lipton’s voice’s always quirky and alive, always ready to report the world straight to us, without patronizing, for “this battle is parent by parent / and I have homework to do.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Musica Humana

        Robert Lipton’s poems are “like a wind/blowing through a bombed-out house” and he knows “what that bomber is.” He writes from the consciousness of the bombed and “the living narrator.” World weary, grieving, cynical, ironic, raging, from the real to the surreal, A Complex Bravery is of the drek of our world gone mad, “the features of erotic despair.” “This is where I keep my mother&rsuo;s love.” But “Even after all this/there is singing about paradise.” “Not Me in Nablus ” is one of the important poems of this era.
—strong. Sharon Doubiago author of Hard Country, Body & Soul

Caroline Maun

The Sleeping

        The Sleeping, with two of its poems having been nominated for the 2007 Pushcart Prize, is the first book of poetry by Caroline Maun. She is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott (National Poetry Foundation, 2005). She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1998. She was an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Morgan State University from 1998-2004. While at Morgan State, she served as founding Writing Center director and co-coordinator of freshman composition. She has also served on the executive committee and as treasurer of the Middle Atlantic Writers Association. Since 2004, she has been an assistant professor of critical literacies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. Recently, she was named one of two recipients of WSU’s Academy of Scholars Junior Faculty Award for 2006. She lives in Grosse Pointe Park.

“Caroline Maun’s The Sleeping is a compelling and intimate exploration of the self. In language that is at the same time sophisticated and coherent, Maun offers startling images of her body as it is acted upon by the doctor, the rapist, the lover. In other poems the poet bears witness to terrifying narratives —the cicadas who return every seventeen years only to emerge and to die. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the volume is Maun’s ability to recall private places and through them create universal images of childhood, sexuality, and death.”
—Mary Jane Lupton, Author of Menstruation and Psychoanalysis

Daniel Padilla

Solute

        Daniel Padilla studied writing at Albion College in Albion, Mich., University of Detroit-Mercy and Washburn University in Topeka, KS., and in several workshops. Also an artist specializing in pastel drawing, his writing is also enhanced by his studies of the visual arts in the streets, galleries and museums locally and throughout the United States as well as in Central America, South America and Europe. He lives and works in his studio in Plymouth.

        Even when Padilla’s speakers prove to find themselves immobile, or unmoving, as in “Wanderlust,” even in this static state the body still exists, there is the “I am” of presence, and through it all, even at its darkest hour, the heart still seeks: “my body/ambitious/desire.” Here in these poems, here in this world, “a light remains.” This is a book that, standing at the center of it all, speaking out to us from the heart”s deepest desire, is a voice that conjures up and paints for us a portrait of the artist as a young man, a young man who is a young poet who, like a child who sees more of the world than us adults do with our tired eyes, “build[s]/ ideas/ in a sandbox/ hoping for rain.”

Jim Schley

As When, In Season

Jim Schley grew up in Wisconsin and moved to New England in 1975 to attend Dartmouth College, where he majored in Literature & Creative Writing and Native American Studies. In 1986 he earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has been co-editor of the literary quarterly New England Review, production editor for University Press of New England, and editor-in-chief of Chelsea Green Publishing Company and has edited more than a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects, including poetry and fiction, literary essays, history, art, Native American culture, organic farming and gardening, solar and wind energy, and natural architecture and building techniques. He has also been very active as a teacher with Community College of Vermont and the Vermont Humanities Council. A frequent performer with experimental theatre ensembles, including Signal & Noise and FLOCK Dance Troupe, he has toured internationally with Bread & Puppet Theater and the Swiss movement-theater company Les Montreurs dÕImages. JimÕs poems have been featured in Best American Spiritual Writing, on Garrison KeillorÕs radio program ÒThe WriterÕs Almanac,Ó and in KeillorÕs companion book Good Poems, as well as in a poetry chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999; chapiteau.org), which Christopher Merrill called Òthe most beautiful book of poems I've ever seen.Ó HeÕs an associate of the journalists' collective Homelands Research Group (homelands.org) and is now executive director of The Frost Place (frostplace.org), a museum and poetry education center based at Robert Frost's historic homestead in Franconia, N.H. Jim Schley lives with his wife Rebecca Bailey and their daughter Lillian in a home they built themselves as part of an off-the-grid, multi-family cooperative in central Vermont.

Alexander Suczek

The Witness of Music

        In addition to his longtime service to Pro Musica Detroit, Alexander Suczek’s involvement in classical music and the arts began while a student at Harvard University as a company member of the Brattle Theater. Since then, Suczek has performed as a classical guitarist and folk and art singer and headed a summer concert series for 25 years. For the past several years, he has authored a weekly column in the Grosse Pointe News, "State of the Arts." In 2006, he was decorated by the Austrian government for promoting that country’s image in arts and music in the United States. Now retired, he was a writer and executive for Campbell-Ewald. He now spends his time at his homes in Grosse Pointe Farms and South Padre Island, Texas.

Russell Thorburn

Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged

        Russell Thorburn is the author of Approximate Desire (New Issues Poetry, 1999). His poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals both on and off line, including Briar Cliff Review, Full Circle Journal, LitRag, Parting Gifts, Passages North, Poet Lore, Praire Schooner, Puerto del Sol, The Quarterly, Quarterly West, Sou'wester, Third Coast, Willow Springs and Witness. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has been awarded creative artist grants from the State of Michigan. Since 2000 he has been teaching poetry in Upper Peninsula schools through Michigan Council of Arts and Cultural Affairs. He has taught college classes at Marquette Branch Prison and Northern Michigan University. He is editor of numerous poetry books. He lives in Marquette, Michigan, with his wife, Emily, and three sons, Gabriel, Christopher and Michael.

G.C.Waldrep

Homage to Paul Celan

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum.

Franz Wright

The Catfish

Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collections, GodÕs Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. WrightÕs other books include 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). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by RenŽ Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He 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. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.

David Matlin

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum.

Piotr Florczyk

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum.