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(Bios in alphabetical order)
Eric Baus’s first book, The To Sound, was selected by Forrest Gander for the 2002 Verse Prize and published in April 2004. He has published poems in Verse, Hambone, First Intensity, 3rd bed, Colorado Review, and other journals, and currently lives in western Massachusetts.
Deborah Bogen’s chapbook, Living by the Children’s Cemetery, won the 2002 ByLine Press Competition (Judge Edward Hirsch). This year her manuscript, Landscape with Silos, was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize and she was a semi-finalist for the Discovery/Nation Award. Her work has appeared widely in journals: Field, Poetry International, Mudfish, Rivendell, JAMA and Poet Lore, among others. She’s part of the Penn Ave. Arts Initiative providing free writing and art classes to youth in the Garfield, Bloomfield and Lawrenceville neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, PA. Sample of her work.
Michael Byers is the author of The Coast of Good Intentions, a book of stories, and Long for This World, a novel. His first book was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Prize and received the Sue Kaufman award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, and his work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards. A native of Seattle, he now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
Paola Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and Bordighera Poetry Prize First Runner-up chosen by Donna Masini. Death by Renaissance, her first book of poems from Bottom Dog Press, is set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant grandfather and father worked in the steel mill. Pittsburgh Magazine called her “an Italian John Wideman who captures the voice and rhythms of her remembered world” and the Indiana Review said “Few books address the anxiety of moving between classes and the assimilation of second-generation immigrants with such urgency and poetic capability as Paola Corso's first collection of poems.” Contact her at paola_corso@hotmail.com. Praise for Death By Renaissance. Sample of her work.
David Daniel was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For the last decade, he has been poetry editor of the literary journal Ploughshares and has taught literature and poetry writing at Emerson College in Boston. His first full-length collection, Seven-Star Bird, was published this fall from Graywolf Press, distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Daniel has been called, by Harold Bloom, “an authentic heir to Hart Crane.” His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely. Daniel is also president and co-founder of the first independent part-time faculty union in the East—the Affiliated Faculty of Emerson College. He received degrees from Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia, where he was a Hoynes Fellow. Daniel is also a songwriter, and for the next year, he will be touring the country with both his book and his music.
Toi Derricotte, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has published four books of poems, The Empress of the Death House, Natural Birth, Captivity, and Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a memoir, The Black Notebooks. The Black Notebooks was a recipient of the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Nonfiction Award, and was nominated for the PEN Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has won numerous awards, including two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. She is the co-founder of Cave Canem, the historic first workshop/retreat for African American poets. Sharon Olds says of her: “This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today.”
The Gist Street Cookout extravaganza each July has become a favored event for everyone. This year, Gist Street is teaming up with Verse Press to bring you Versapalooza, a Verse Press sampler of poetry you can eat along with the barbeque. Here are the readers: Peter Richards, Diane Wald, Lori Shine, Christian Hawkey, and Eric Baus.
Lucrecia Guerrero’s first collection of short stories, Chasing Shadows, was published by Chronicle Books in 2000. Her stories have also appeared in journals such as the Colorado Review and ByLine. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from Montgomery County Arts and Culture District and a Hedgebrook Residency Fellowship. She is currently writing a novel.
Christian Hawkey’s first book, The Book of Funnels, is due from Verse Press in October 2004. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Pratt Institute in New York City and co-founder of the poetry journal jubilat, he lives in Brooklyn.
Elizabeth Kadetsky lives in the East Village of Manhattan. A graduate of the fiction workshop at UC Irvine, her memoir about the yogi BKS Iyengar and the spiritual-political roots of modern yoga in India is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company (First There Is a Mountain, January 2004). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Santa Monica Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. She has received several creative writing awards, including a Fulbright to study in India, mention in the Atlantic Monthly’s student fiction award and a Dodge fellowship in fiction. Her award-winning journalism has appeared in the Village Voice, the Nation and elsewhere, and she teaches writing and a yearly course on immigration at the graduate school of Journalism at Columbia University.
Joy Katz was trained in industrial design. Her first book, Fabulae, won the 2002 Crab Orchard Award. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Lost Poems and a senior editor at Pleiades. Her work appears in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Margie, The Hat, Verse, Indiana Review, and The Best American Poetry 2003, and has earned honors including a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford. She works in New York as a copy editor and book designer and teaches poetry writing at The New School.
Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Leslie’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, The Mississippi Review, Red Brick Review, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Leslie is a freelance copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches workshops for the Poet’s Studio, the International Poetry Forum, and classes for the University of Pittsburgh’s General Studies Program. She served for five years as editor and cofounder of HEArt — Human Equity Through Art — the nation’s only journal of literature and art devoted to confronting discrimination and promoting social justice.
Catherine E. McKinley is author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (Counterpoint/Basic Books, 2002), and co-editor of the anthology Afrekete (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1995). She is currently writing a novel about the women who work and trade indigo in West Africa, which she researched as a Fulbright Fellow in Ghana (1999-2000), and is editing an epistolary history of African American Writing (1750-2000) under contract with Crown Books/Random House (forthcoming in 2006). She is the Associate Director of the Publishing Certificate Program at City College of New York and teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing at the college. McKinley was the recipient of an Audre Lorde Estate Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction grant, and a MacDowell Colony for the Arts residency. She lives in New York.
John McNally is author of The Book of Ralph, which will be published in March of 2004 by The Free Press (Simon and Schuster). His previous collection, Troublemakers (Iowa, 2000), won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (2000) and the Nebraska Book Award (2001), and was a Book Sense 76 selection. John’s recent fiction has appeared in The Idaho Review, The Florida Review, New England Review, Natural Bridge, and Crab Orchard Review. He’s held Michener (U. of Iowa), Djerassi (U. of Wisconsin), and Jenny McKean Moore (George Washington University) fellowships. John has also edited several anthologies: Bottom of the Ninth: 24 Great Short Stories about Baseball (Southern Illinois, 2003) and Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color (Iowa, 2002) and The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors (Wisconsin, 2001) and and High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories about Adultery (Morrow, 1997). He holds degrees from U. of Nebraska (Ph.D.), U. of Iowa (M.F.A.), and Southern Illinois University (B.A.). A native of Chicago’s southwest side, he’s presently an assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Email: knesset@allegheny.edu
Web: http://merlin2.alleg.edu/employee/k/knesset/
Peter Richards is the author of Nude Siren (Verse/Zephyr 2003), and Oubliette (Verse, 2001) which won a Massachusetts Center for the Book Honors Award. He teaches at Tufts University.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, Nice Hat. Thanks. (with Joshua Beckman), the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (with Joshua Beckman), and the forthcoming A Green Light. He is a co-founder and poetry editor of Fence Magazine and Fence Books, and lives in Brooklyn. Samples of his work.
Lori Shine’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Canary, Conduit, Crowd, Indiana Review and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Verse Press.
Aaron Smith is the author of Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize selected by Denise Duhamel.
Tracey K. Smith received degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She has been awarded a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and a residency at Fundación Valparaiso. She currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. Her book, The Body’s Question (October 2003) is the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best unpublished manuscript by an African American poet. Upon choosing the book, Kevin Young called The Body’s Question “A terrific book, well-crafted, surprising, intelligent, questioning, ambitious in its scope and brilliant in realizing that ambition.”
“The Body’s Question is an answer to pure passion.” —Yusef Komunyakaa
Philip Terman is the author of the poetry collection The House of Sages (Mammoth Books, 1998) and Book of the Unbroken Days (Mammoth Books, 2004). Poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and Tikkun. He teaches creative writing and literature at Clarion University, where he also directs the visiting writers series and advises the literary journal, Tobeco. As well, he co-directs the new literary festival at the Chautauqua Institute (anyone interested in more information about this lit festival can email him at terman@clarion.edu). He lives in a one-room schoolhouse with his wife and two daughters outside of Grove City, PA. Samples of his work.
Antonio Vallone was educated at Monroe Community College (AS in Business Administration), the State University of New York at Brockport (BS and MA in English/creative writing), Purdue University (doctoral course work in rhetoric and composition), and Indiana University at Bloomington (MFA in poetry and modern and contemporary literature). He is the editor of Pennsylvania English, the journal of the Pennsylvania College English Association, and publisher-editor of MAMMOTH books, a literary publishing company which has published in its first five years of operation twelve titles. He has also held editorial positions with the Indiana Review and the Brockport Review. His poems have been published in a number of journals in the United States and England. In addition, he is the author of three collections of poems, The Blackbirds' Applause, Grass Saxophones, and Golden Carp, as well as a chapbook-length poem, Chinese Bats, and the English 050 Introductory Creative Writing study guide for Pennsylvania State University's Department of Distance Education. His collection American Zen was published in 2003. Another collection, Blackberry Alleys, is under consideration, and two other collections, Politics of Rivers and White Star, are in progress. Three of his poems have appeared in an anthology of contemporary American poetry for children and young adults titled Roots and Flowers, edited by Liz Rosenberg. A prose poem has appeared in the anthology Rebellious Confessions, edited by Victor Thorn, and a sudden fiction has appeared in the anthology Sudden Stories, edited by Dinty W. Moore. An essay of his on the Italian-American poet Maria Mazzioti Gillan will appear in a critical edition of her work to be published by Guernica Editions. Sample of his work.
Diane Wald’s second collection, The Yellow Hotel (Verse, 2002) was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Also the author of Lucid Suitcase, she lives near Boston and works for the MSPCA.
Kellie Wells was awarded the 2001 Flannery O’Connor Award and the 2003 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for her collection of short fiction, Compression Scars. She is a 2002 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for emerging women writers. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her novel Skin is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. She teaches in the creative writing program at Washington University.
Lois Williams comes to Pittsburgh via the U.K., where she grew up and still goes back to—especially in her writing. Her poems have won her an Academy of American Poets prize from the University of Pittsburgh and a full fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. In 2003 she received a Barbara Deming Memorial award for her work in nonfiction. Check out the excerpt from her prize winning essay, “Two Bodies Breathing.”
David Young is the author of numerous books of poetry including At the White Window (Ohio State Press), and his translation, The Poetry of Petrarch, is out this year with Farrar, Strous & Giroux. He has won many awards including a Pushcart Prize and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship, Santa Fe Institute for the Arts. David lives in Oberlin, Ohio where he is editor of FIELD, a semiannual journal of poetry and poetics.
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