NIN ANDREWS grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. She has authored several books, among them, Spontaneous Breasts, The Book of Orgasms, Mid-Life Crisis with Dick and Jane, and sleeping with Houdini. She is the recipient of many awards and has been published in numerous journals and anthologies.

CHRISTIAN BARTER was born and raised in rural Maine. He received a B.A. from Bates College, in music composition, and an M.F.A in Writing from Vermont College. He supervises a trail crew in Bar Harbor, Maine, doing dry stone masonry, tree work, and wild-land firefighting. Christian’s poems have appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Georgia Review, North American Review, American Scholar and Notre Dame Review. He has received residency fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation and the Espy Foundation.

BHISHAM BHERWANI studied Fine Arts at New England College.  He is also a graduate of New York University and Cornell University, and the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, New England College, and The Frost Place. He was born in Bombay, India; he lives in New York City.

CELIA BLAND is the author of thirteen books for young readers, including the historical novel, The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine, which was a finalist for the Heckin Award for Children’s Fiction. Her poetry has been collected in anthologies published by Persea and Faber & Faber, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a contributing editor to The New York Public Library Desk Reference, and has published articles in Poets & Writers, Forbes Best of the Web, Art & Antiques and other magazines. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is Director of College Writing at Bard College.

ELOISE BRUCE has worked in all aspects of the theatre and is a teaching artist for New Jersey Writer’s Project and a middle school and high school for the arts. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals , including American Letters and Commentary, Blue Moon Review and The Paterson Literary Review, among others. She is a recipient of a Fellowship in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and helps administrate The Frost Place Festival of Poetry in Franconia, NH. Bruce lives with her husband, the poet David Keller in Lawrenceville, NJ.

ANDREA CARTER BROWN was born in Paterson, NJ. She is the author of a chapbook, Brook & Rainbow, which won the 2000 Sow’s Ear Press Competition, and her work as appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshare, Five Points, and the Mississippi Review, among other publications. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Writer’s Voice, Thin Air, River Oak Review and The MacGuffin. She won the 2004 River Styx Poetry Prize for her sonnet crown “September 12.” A longtime resident of New York City, she now lives on the west coast and is Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal at Pomona College.

TERESA CARSON grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the youngest of ten in a blue-collar family. At eighteen she joined New Jersey Bell and before retiring in 2003, worked in a series of non-traditional-for-women jobs. In 2004 she earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has never left Hudson County and now lives there with her husband John.

KAREN CHASE lives in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Yale Review. Her collection of poems, Kazimierz Square, was short-listed by ForeWord Magazine for their 2000 Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her poems have been widely anthologized, including work in The Norton Introduction to Poetry and Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. Her non-fiction book, Land of Stone, was published by Wayne State University Press in March 2007.

DAVID S. CHO was born and raised in the Chicago area, along with his brother and extended family, the proud children of Korean immigrants in the early 1970?s. As an Asian American, he is a man of many ?homes,? balancing his American, Asian immigrant, and Asian American heritage. He has also lived, studied, and taught in Champaign- Urbana, Chicago, Seattle, and West-Central Indiana, currently splitting time between Western Michigan, and Naperville, Illinois, where he resides with his wife and three children. A chapbook, Song of Our Songs, was published in July 2010, and a scholarly manuscript on 20th Century Korean American novels in 2011.

Night Sessions

ROBERT CORDING teaches English and Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published five collections of poems: Life-list, which won the Ohio State University Press Journal Award in 1987, What Binds Us to This World (Copper Beach Press 1991), Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1996), Against Consolation (CavanKerry Press, 2002), Common Life (CavanKerry Press, 2006). He has received two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts. In 1992, he was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in the Nation, Image, AGNI, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review, The New Yorker and many other magazines. He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut with his wife and three children.

SAM CORNISH grew up in Baltimore, MD and has lived in Boston, MA for the past 35 years. Following his move to Boston, he was a teacher at the Highland Park Community School in Roxbury, MA, and was also active in the Poetry in the Schools Program in Boston and Cambridge, MA. In the early 80s, he was the Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities and subsequently, an instructor in Creative Writing at Emerson College until his retirement in 2006.  He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and St. Botolph Society, among others. In addition to his nine books of poetry and two children’s books, he has been published in dozens of periodicals, including Essence, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe. In 2007, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of the City of Boston.

MOYRA DONALDSON was a founding member of the Creative Writers’ Network and is Literary Editor for Fortnight magazine. In addition to Snakeskin Stilettos, her collections of poetry include Kissing Ghosts and Beneath the Ice. She has produced four stage plays, and her screenplay “h” was filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she graduated in English Language and Literature from Queens University. She also qualified as a social worker and studied social welfare law, which led to another career in welfare and education. Literary honors include the National Women’s Poetry Competition and the Allingham Award. Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, she now lives in Newtownards with her husband John Liddle and daughters Claire and Jannah.

CATHERINE DOTY is the recipient of the 2003 Marjorie J. Wilson Award, an Academy of American Poets Award, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was born and raised in Garrett Mountain in Paterson, NJ and has taught thereabouts for many years.

SHERRY FAIRCHOK was born in Scranton in1962. She spent the early part of her childhood in Taylor, PA, a coal-mining town, in which her family has lived since the 1880s, and where her grandfather, great-uncles, and great –grandfather worked as miners. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and an M.F. A. degree from Sarah Lawrence college. Her chapbook, A Stone that Burns, won the Ledge 1999 Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, DoubleTake, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. She works as an information technology editor and lives in Mount Vernon, NY.

MARIE LAWSON FIALA, born in Europe, came to the United States as a child.Her first language was Czech, and she learned English only after starting grade school. Ms.Fiala earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with Distinction from Stanford University, her Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School, and her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Ms.Fiala is a full-tie practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. She is married and the mother of three children, and lives with her family, two wise cats, and a humble dog, in Berkeley, CA.

SONDRA GASH grew up in Paterson, NJ. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Calyx, The Paterson Literary Review, and U.S. 1 Worksheets. She has received grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo, and won first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. In 1999, the Geraldine Dodge Foundation awarded her a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey, where she teaches writing and directs the poetry program at the Women’s Resource Center in Summit.

ROSS GAY was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up outside of Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Atlanta Review, among other journals. Ross is a Cave Canem fellow and has been a Breadloaf Tuition Scholar. In addition to holding a Ph.D in American Literature from Temple University, he is a basketball coach, an occasional demolition man, a painter, and a faculty member at New England College's Low-Residency MFA program.

JOHN HAINES, poet, essayist, and teacher was born in 1924 and died in March 2011. After studying painting, he spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer and New Poems 1980-88, for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He has also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays, and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness. He has taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, University of Montana, Bucknell University, and the University of Cincinnati. He was Guest Poet at both the International Shakespeare Conference at Vladimir University, Russia and at Summer Wordsworth Conference, Grasmere, UK. He was Resident at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy and Rasmuson Fellow at the U.S. Artists Meeting, Los Angeles. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. In 2008, Sewanee Review awarded Haines the Atkin Taylor Award for Poetry.

Descent

Bronx native JOAN CUSACK HANDLER’s first poetry collection, Glorious, debuted in 2003 and was hailed as “an open field verse bildungsroman of adulthood” by Publishers Weekly. Its companion CD was produced in 2007. Recipient of four Pushcart nominations and The Sampler Award from The Boston Review, her poems have appeared in Agni, The New York Times, Poetry East and Seattle Review. She’s Founder/Publisher of CavanKerry Press and a clinical psychologist and lives in Fort Lee, NJ and East Hampton, NY with her husband, Alan, a retired psychologist. Their one son, David, is co-founder of (Le) Poisson Rouge, a music/ arts venue at the former Village Gate in NYC.

Glorious
Red Canoe: Love In Its Making

ELIZABETH HALL HUTNER is a writer, scholar and musician living in Princeton, N.J., where she is completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Most recently, she has written short essays which have been published in A Real Life, a bimonthly magazine. Hutner graduated from Yale University, where she studied with Mark Strand and J.D. McClatchy, and she worked with Marvin Bell at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. She also holds an M.A. from Princeton.

MARCUS JACKSON was born in Toledo, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among many other publications. He has received fellowships from New York University and Cave Canem.

SUSAN JACKSON serves on the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers, Inc.,and the National Arts Club Literary Committee. Before moving to New Jersey, she lived in France, Belgium, Portugal and Holland. She has received a fellowship grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation residency grant to attend the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been published in literary journals such as NIMROD and the Paterson Literary Review.

GRAY JACOBIK earned her Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Brandeis University and for many years served as a professor of literature at Eastern Connecticut State University. A widely-published poet, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Jacobik’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ontario Review, The Georgia Review, Connecticut Review and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is the winner of many awards, among them the Yeats Prize, the Emily Dickinson Prize, the Juniper Prize, the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and the AWP Poetry Series Award. She has served as the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place. From 2003 until 2009, Gray served on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program (University of Southern Maine). She is a painter as well as a poet and lives with her husband, Bruce Gregory, in Deep River, Connecticut.

CHRISTINE KORFHAGE was born in Albany, NY and grew up overseas. A former artisan and juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, she began writing poetry at age 49. Returning to school after three decades, in 1999 she received her B.A. from Vermont College’s Adult Degree Program where she was awarded a Fellowship for Excellence in Creative Writing. She received her M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2001. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Nimrod International Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Red Rock Review and The Spoon River Poetry Review. A mother and grandmother, Christine lives in New Hampshire.

LAURIE LAMON is professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and she was the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship in 2007. Her collection, The Fork Without Hunger (CavanKerry), was published in 2005. Her poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Primavera and Poetry Northwest.

JOSEPH O. LEGASPI spent his childhood in the Philippines and immigrated with his family to Los Angeles when he was twelve. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and the Creative Writing Program at New York University.  He lives in New York City and works at Columbia University.  A recipient of a 2001 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he is a co-founder of Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.

HOWARD LEVY has been a teacher in museums and schools in New York and now works in business. He was the recipient of a New York State Creative Artists Public Service Award in Poetry and his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review and The Threepenny Review. He has been a member of the resident faculty at The Frost Place Poetry Festival. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS was born in Donegal, Ireland and grew up and was educated between that country and England. He took his bachelor’s degree at the University of Ulster and obtained a PH.D from the University of Durham: its subject was Ezra Pound.  His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, The Dublin Review and other journals. He currently teaches literature to undergraduates in Lugano, Switzerland.

MARTIN MOONEY’s poetry, short fiction, reviews, criticism and cultural commentary have been published in Irish and British periodicals. Following Grub, which on its original release in Ireland won the Brendan Behand Memorial Award, Mooney published Bonfire Makers, Operation Sandcastle, and Rasputin and His Children. His poems have appeared in Field and The Gettsyburg Review.  He was writer-in-residence as the Brighton Festival and the Aspects Festival of Irish Writing, and twice was appointed a member of the resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place Poetry Festival in Franconia, NH.

MARK NEPO has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over thirty years. Nominated for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, he is the author of thirteen books. His work has been translated into French, Portuguese, Japanese and Danish. As a cancer survivor, Mark is committed to the usefulness of daily inner life. Through both his writing and teaching, he remains devoted to the life of inner transformation and relationship. For eighteen years, Mark taught at the State University of New York at Albany. He now serves as a Program Officer for the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, MI. In his spare time, Nepo tinkers at the piano, loves baseball and jazz and life, and winter walks with his wife, Susan and their dog, Mira.

RICHARD JEFFREY NEWMAN, an Associate Professor at Nassau Community College, New York, is an essayist, poet and translator who has been publishing his work since 1988, when the essay “His Sexuality; Her Reproductive Rights” appeared in Changing Men magazine. Since then, his essays, poems and translations have appeared in a wide range of journals, among them Prairie Schooner and Birmingham Poetry Review. He has given talks and led workshops on writing autobiographically about gender, sex and sexuality. His first book of translations, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, was published by Global Scholarly Publications.

JANUARY GILL O'NEIL is a senior writer and editor at Babson College. Her poetry and articles have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Field, Callaloo, Seattle Review, Stuff Magazine, Poetry Thursday, and two Cave Canem anthologies, among others. She is a fellow with Cave Canem poets, runs a blog called Poet Mom and is cofounder and cohost of New and Emerging Writers Series (NEWS), a blossoming literary series in Arlington, Massachusetts.

GEORGIANNA ORSINI attended Wellesley College and Harvard University and received her B.A. degree from Columbia University, during which time she worked as a Program Coordinator at International House. She has lived in Tuscany and New York. Her gardens have been featured in House and Garden, House Beautiful and American Women’s Garden. At present, she lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she continues to make gardens.

PEGGY PENN’s poetry has appeared in several publications including O Magazine, The Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Western Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review and Margie Review. She won the poem for the first poem published in the journal Kimera, and the first Emily Dickinson Award for innovative poetry. Penn’s first poetry collection, So Close, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2001.

DAWN POTTER is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Her most recent book is a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). A previous poetry collection Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbook Editions), was released in 2004. She lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.

JACK RIDL is the author of several collections  of poetry — including Broken Symmetry, Outside the Center Ring and Against Elegies — and several literature textbooks. He taught poetry and literature for thirty-six years, was named one of the 100 most influential educators in the world of sport by the Institute for International Sport, and awarded Michigan Professor of the Year by the CASE/Carnegies foundation. He learned about basketball from his father, Hall of Fame basketball coach C.G. "Buzz" Ridl.

KENNETH ROSEN was born in Boston, and has lived in Maine since 1965. He recently taught at the American University in Bulgaria, and as a Fulbright professor at Sofia University. Whole Horse, his first collection, was selected for Richard Howard’s Braziller Poetry Series. Others are The Hebrew Lion, Black Leaves, Longfellow Square, Reptile Mind, and No Snake, No Paradise. He founded the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference n 1981, and directed it for ten years.

MARY RUEFLE has published six books of poetry, including Among the Musk Ox People (Carnegie Mellon, 2002). Apparition Hill was completed in 1989 in China, where she was teaching. It falls between her books, The Adamant (University of Iowa, 1989) and Cold Pluto (Carnegie Mellon, 1996). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.

ROBERT SEDER was a production and lighting designer for many dance and theater companies for 20 years, working with David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Carolyn Brown, Eric Bogosian, and Philip Glass, among others. He was a semifinalist for the Julie Harris Playwright award in 1987 with LIGHT, and wrote several other plays, produced in New York City, Madison and Boston. He also wrote novels and short stories in addition to his narrative of his first bone marrow transplant. Bob taught many writing workshops with Bard students and with adults in the Bard Continuing Studies Program and Intergenerational Seminars. He was an enthusiastic participant and teacher in the Bard College Language and Thinking Program and also offered “Writing Our Illness” workshops to the community. After undergoing a second bone marrow transplant in August 2001, he died on March 6, 2002, from multiple infections that his weakened immune system was unable to defeat.

JOAN SELIGER SIDNEY is writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. She also facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult writing workshop. Her dream-came-true job was teaching creative writing at the Université de Grenoble, France.

She has published two chapbooks, Deep Between the Rocks (Andrew Mountain, 1985) and The Way the Past Comes Back (The Kutenai Press, 1991). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Louisville Review, Kaleidoscope, and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems published in 2003 were nominated for a Pushcart Prize XXIX. She lives in Storrs, Connecticut, with her husband. Their four adult children are thriving.

Body of Diminishing Motion
Poems and a Memoir

PAMELA SPIRO WAGNER is an award-winning writer who lives with schizophrenia complicated by narcolepsy and CNS Lyme disease. She graduated from Brown University and briefly attended medical school. Despite having spent at least eight years of her life in psychiatric units, she co-authored Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. Presently she writes WAGBlog at http://wagblog.wordpress.com and is at work on another book.

JACK WILER

Jack Wiler was raised in New Jersey and lived in Jersey City until his death in 2009. Diagnosed with AID's in 2001, Jack spent the last years of his life writing and educating students about poetry. For much of his life, he worked in pest control, most notably for Acme Exterminating in New York. He worked for Long Shot Magazine for many years and in association with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation worked as a visiting poet in the schools.

Jack was a frequent participant at The Frost Place in New Hampshire and performed his poetry across the United States. His poetry has been anthologized in Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Bum Rush the Page, and The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost lace, Volume II. Fun Being Me was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. Jack’s words can be found online at http://jackwiler.blogspot.com.

BARON WORMSER is the author of eight books of poetry, a poetry chapbook, a memoir, a book of short stories and has co-authored two books about teaching poetry. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching held in Franconia, NH. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of Maine.

Impenitent Notes

The Poetry of Life: Ten Stories