2008 Poetry Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Simone Beaubien

Poetry Slam - Saturday 4:00 PM

Simone Beaubien makes her home in suburban Massachusetts, working as an EMT and volunteering for the local ultimate disco league. She is proud to co-host the open mic and slam every Wednesday night at the world-famous Cantab Lounge in Boston.

Simone’s poetry runs the gamut from sonnets to slam, including themes from feminism to the laws of physics (sometimes in the same poem). She was lucky enough to compete in the 2001 National Poetry Slam as a member of the 2001 Boston/Cantab Slam Team, and received the 2002 Best Performance Poet (female) award from the Boston Poetry Awards. Currently, she is a member of Boston’s Off-Broadway Poetry Troupe and the 2004 Boston/Cantab Slam Team.

David Berman

Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

David Berman, a noted attorney, is a graduate of the University of Florida, where he studied with Elliott Coleman. He earned graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins University and Boston University, where he studied with Robert Lowell. While attending Harvard Law School he studied with Archibald MacLeish and frequently published work in the Harvard Advocate. Berman’s work has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Counter Measures, The Formalist, Harvard Magazine, Piedmont Literary Review, The Epigrammatist, Sparrow, Iambs & Trochees, and Orbis. He has also published three chapbooks: Future Imperfect (State Street Press, 1982), Slippage (Robert L. Barth, 1996), and David Berman: Greatest Hits 1965–2002 (Pudding House, 2002). His awards and honors include several from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, which sponsors a yearly national competition. In 1999 David Berman adjudicated the Newburyport Art Association Annual Poetry Contest.

Bob Brodsky

Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

Bob Brodsky has pursued parallel interests in issues of justice, visual harmonies, and community vitality. As a member of the clergy he wrestled with the opportunities of the 1960s, as a filmmaker and television technician he works to support film artists and archivists, and as an amateur singer and writer he does what he can to prompt appreciation of varied approaches to familiar themes. In 2005 he completed a memoir, Marching Bands Make Me Cry, to honor five individuals who have greatly informed him. And as a lucky one who had the opportunity to sit with Robert Frost, Richard Niebuhr, and Jean Rouch, he is glad to lend his voice to the Polyphony.

Patricia Callan

The Shameless Muse - Saturday 10:00 AM
Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

Patricia Callan is a playwright and poet living in Massachusetts and Florida. Her play, Papa’s House, won the Loren Taylor Memorial Playwriting Contest. Her poetry has been published in Voices, Sea Sands, Candelabrum, and other periodicals. She is vice-president of Fabulous African Fabrics, an organization that helps women and children fighting AIDS in Kenya.

Michael Cantor

Echoes and Whispers: Breakfast with Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
In the Works - Saturday 11:30 AM

Michael Cantor has won the Newburyport Art Association Poetry Competition and the New England Poetry Club’s Erika Mumford Prize. Pudding House Press published his chapbook, The Performer, in 2007. His work has appeared in Measure, Margie, The Formalist, The Dark Horse, Texas Poetry Journal, The Atlanta Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review (for which he was a Robert Penn Warren Award finalist), The Comstock Review (for which he received a Pushcart Prize nomination), and many other journals, anthologies, and e-zines. Born in New York, Cantor has lived and worked in Japan, Europe, and Latin America, and now resides on Plum Island.

Robert Crawford

Echoes and Whispers: Breakfast with Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM

Robert Crawford lives in Chester, New Hampshire. He is an assistant professor at Chester College of New England, where he teaches poetry and is the director of information technologies. His poems have won numerous national awards and have appeared in The Formalist, First Things, The Dark Horse, Pivot, The Comstock Review, The Lyric, Light, and other journals. His first book of poetry, Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man, was published by David Robert Books in 2005.

David Davis

Echoes and Whispers: Breakfast with Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM

David Davis has been a participant in the Powow River Poets group for two years. He began writing poetry in the 1960s in Denver, Colorado, where — on a good day — he and a group of other poets would earn their suppers doing street readings. He is currently an artificial intelligence consultant who has written or edited four books in his area of specialization. His last public presentation was at the Smithsonian Institution, where he gave a well-received talk on the use of computer simulations to support government policymakers in the twenty-first century.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Conversations About Poetry - Friday 6:00 PM
Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM
Closing Ceremony: The Final Word - Saturday 6:00 PM

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She has lived in the United States since 1939 and taught high school English in New York City for several years. Espaillat writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies. Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education.

Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor. For 14 years, she coordinated the Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest, is on the planning committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival, and is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She has also been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the area north of Boston, and has assisted teachers Debbie Szabo and César Sánchez Beras with the planning for bilingual activities shared by high school students of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Newburyport.

Erica Funkhouser

Closing Ceremony: The Final Word - Saturday 6:00 PM

Erica Funkhouser is the author of four books of poetry: Natural Affinities (Alice James Books, 1983), Sure Shot And Other Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), The Actual World (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), and Pursuit (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). Her fifth book, Earthly, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in the spring of 2008. Funkhouser’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Poetry, and other magazines and anthologies. Educated at Vassar College and Stanford University, she was honored as a Literary Light by the Boston Public Library in 2002 and is a 2007 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Essex, Massachusetts, and teaches introductory and advanced poetry writing at MIT

Dana Gioia

Conversations About Poetry - Friday 6:00 PM
Reading and Literature: Catalysts of Culture - Saturday 11:30 AM

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Gioia (pronounced JOY-uh) has published three full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks; Interrogations at Noon won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 book Can Poetry Matter? is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. Gioia is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian, and his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate and The Hudson Review. A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia received a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He has taught as a visiting writer at Johns Hopkins University, Sarah Lawrence College, Colorado College, and Wesleyan University.

Midge Goldberg

Echoes and Whispers: Breakfast with Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM

Midge Goldberg is the author of Flume Ride, a book of original poetry published in 2006 by David Robert Books. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Powow River Anthology, Rhyming Poems, and European Romantic Poetry. Her work has appeared in Measure, First Things, Dogwood, Light, Atlanta Review, and other national and international journals. She received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire in 2006.

José B. Gonzalez

The Latino Boom - Saturday 10:00 AM

José B. Gonzalez was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and immigrated to Connecticut at the age of eight. He has published poetry in numerous anthologies as well as journals such as Callaloo, Palabra, and Calabash, and his work was recently included in a special edition of OCHO featuring Latino poets. A contributor of essays to both National Public Radio and various scholarly journals, Gonzalez is the founder and editor of LatinoStories.com and co-editor of Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature, published in 2005. He is currently a professor of English at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

Johnny Longfellow

The Shameless Muse - Saturday 10:00 AM

Johnny Longfellow  is a former Newburyport resident who has remained active in the local poetry scene. His published work can be found online at Thieves Jargon and Thunder Sandwich, or in print in Poetry Soup. He currently resides in southern Massachusetts.

A. M. Juster

In the Works - Saturday 11:30 AM

A. M. Juster is the author of a book of Petrarch translations, Longing for Laura (Birch Brook Press, 2001) and a book of original poetry, The Secret Language of Women (University of Evansville Press, 2003), which was selected as the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. His translation of the satires of Horace will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in fall 2008. He is a three-time winner of The Formalist’s Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Juster’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other publications. He has been a featured poet in Light Quarterly and a fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

X. J. Kennedy

Conversations About Poetry - Friday 6:00 PM
Whistling the Truth: X. J. Kennedy Reads  - Saturday 1:00 PM

X. J. Kennedy, who lives in Lexington, has published eight collections of poetry, beginning in 1961 with Nude Descending a Staircase (which won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets) and most recently, in the fall of 2007, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Peeping Tom’s Cabin (BOA Editions). He has received the Poets’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken-Taylor Award from the University of the South, the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, three honorary degrees, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and other goodies. Kennedy has also authored fifteen books of verse and fiction for children, including Brats and the fantasy novel The Owlstone Crown, currently a Front Street paperback. With his wife, Dorothy, he has co-edited two best-selling anthologies of poetry for children and co-edited a selection by the Vermont poet James Hayford. More than five million students have used his writing and literature textbooks, including An Introduction to Poetry, now co-authored with Dana Gioia.

Don Kimball

The Shameless Muse - Saturday 10:00 AM
In the Works - Saturday 11:30 AM

Don Kimball is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications. 2007). His poetry has appeared in Edge City Review, The Formalist, Iambs & Trochees, The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, and various other journals and anthologies. In 2007 one of his poems was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and three other poems won two first prizes and a second prize in national contests sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.

Len Krisak

Echoes and Whispers: Breakfast with Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
In the Works - Saturday 11:30 AM

Len Krisak’s books include Midland, Even as We Speak, If Anything, and complete translations of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and the odes of Horace. His work has appeared in such journals as The Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, PN Review, The Formalist, Literary Imagination, and Classical Outlook. He is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, Robert Frost, and Pinch prizes, among others, and is four-time champion on Jeopardy!

Alfred Nicol

Closing Ceremony: The Final Word - Saturday 6:00 PM

Alfred Nicol, who received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light, edited The Powow River Anthology, published in 2006. His poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Poetry of New England and in Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, and have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, The New England Review, The Formalist, Measure, and many other journals. Nicol was awarded the first annual Anita Dorn Memorial Prize for his new book of poems, Elegy for Everyone, which will be published in 2008.

Ben Pickard

Ben Pickard on John Greenleaf Whittier - Saturday 2:00 PM
Whittier’s Idiosyncratic Relatives - Sunday 2:00 PM

Ben Pickard, a former Professor of English at the University of Florida, taught there for thirty-three years before he retired in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. from Wisconsin and taught at the University of California and Rice University before coming to Florida. His special interest has always been in American Literature and he has published or edited thirteen books, mainly on nineteenth-century authors like John Greenleaf Whittier and Emily Dickinson. He has also been active in the teaching of film and served as a movie columnist for the Gainesville Sun. He helped found a preservation society, Historic Gainesville, Inc., served as its president, and published three books on local history for that organization; one of them, Florida's Eden: An Illustrated History of Alachua County, was the first comprehensive history of the county. In addition he has served as president of the Alachua County Historical Society, helped found the Matheson Historical Center, and then wrote histories of both societies. In 1999 he organized the Alachua Press, Inc., served as its first president until 2004, and oversaw its publishing of eight books on local history.

Toni Treadway

Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

Toni Treadway grew up with a posse of kids sledding through the woods. She hid in treetops with a notebook. Educated by older women in tie shoes, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, and Woodstock, she slept in a shelf of Shakespeare & Company in Paris, worked for board in a fifth century abbey, stood before Black Madonnas in the Massif Central, and taught ESL in factories there. She fell into work with Bob Brodsky and became an advocate for non-professional movies. She’d like to thank the Powow River Poets and Newburyport Choral Society for good vibes and significant help.

Lewis Turco

Conversations About Poetry - Friday 6:00 PM
Lewis Turco Reads from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics
- Saturday 2:30 PM
Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

Lewis Turco is the author of more than forty books, chapbooks, and monographs. His First Poems appeared in 1960 as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry, and in 1968 he published The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which has since become known in the field as the poet’s bible. His book of literary criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award in 1986, and his A Book of Fears won the Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize in 1998. A compendium of his rhymed and metered poems, The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco/Wesli Court, 1953–2004, appeared in 2004 and should be considered the companion volume to his book of nontraditional poetry, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959–2007, both published by Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale, Arizona. From 1965 to 1996 he taught at the State University of New York in Oswego, where he founded the Program in Writing Arts in 1968. He lives in Dresden, Maine.

Deborah Warren

Polyphony - Saturday 4:00 PM

Deborah Warren is the author of two poetry collections: The Size of Happiness (2003, Waywiser Press, London) and Zero Meridian (2004, Ivan R. Dee), which received the fourth annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review.

Richard Wollman

In the Works - Saturday 11:30 AM

Richard Wollman is the author of A Cemetery Affair (Finishing Line Press, 2004) and Evidence of Things Seen (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). His most recent collection of poems—The Art of Need—is currently a finalist for the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. He has won the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, a Distinguished Entry Award in the Campbell Corner Poetry Contest, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Daily, and most recently online at Memorious.org. Wollman received a doctorate in 17th-century literature from Columbia University and is associate professor and co-director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center at Simmons College. A member of the Powow River Poets, he is also a sculptor whose work appears regularly at the Newburyport Art Association.