2009 Poetry Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

David Berman

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 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 4:30 PM

Bob Brodsky works with amateur movie films, some very old, bringing them to their technical best. With commentary he ties them, where possible, to larger historical movements. Similarly, he hears poems attempting to ground specifics to themes of the mind; sometimes they succeed. But even when they don’t, they lead us to wander among their phrases, to draw us together in a circle of wonder.

Patricia Callan

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM

Patricia Callan, is a poet and playwright living in Massachusetts and Florida. Her play Papa’s House won the Loren Taylor Memorial Contest. Her poetry has been published in The Powow River Anthology, Red Lights, Tapestries, Candelabrum (UK) as well as other periodicals. Out of the Case: Instruments on the Analyst’s Couch, her chapbook, was published in 2008. Pat is a member of the Powow River Poets.

Robert W. Crawford

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

Robert W. Crawford lives in Derry, NH. His poems have appeared in Measure, The Formalist, First Things, The Dark Horse, The Lyric, Dogwood, Forbes, and other publications. He won the 2006 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and his first book of poetry, Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man, was published in 2005 by David Robert Books. He is a trustee of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, a long time member of the Powow River Poets, and a co-founder of the Hyla Brook Poets.

David Davis

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

David Davis is a Newbury resident and a four-year member of the Powow River Poets. He began writing poetry in Colorado in the 1960s as a member of a group that performed poems on the streets of Denver, earning enough for a spaghetti dinner on a good day. His poems frequently reflect his experience as a surveyor, rock climber, birder, math teacher, philosophy professor, and artificial intelligence researcher. Davis has edited or written four books in the area of evolutionary computation. In one of his presentations in 2008 he described new techniques for assessing and managing risk to the risk management division of a major international bank. The talk was well received, but came a year too late.

Melina Draper

Closing Distance: A Mother/Daughter Collaboration in Poetry,
by Melina Draper - Saturday 1:00 PM

Melina Draper’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Borderlands: A Texas Review, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, Salamander, Antietam Review, Elixir and other journals. In 2008, Place of Origin~Lugar de Origen, a bilingual book of poetry co-authored with Argentine writer Elena Lafert. was released from Oyster River Press (Durham, NH). Her chapbook, What Better Place than This? was published by Pudding House in 2003. Born and raised mostly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Melina now lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with son, her husband, writer David Crouse, and is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She taught writing at Northern Essex Community College for five years, and now works as an editor and writer for the Geophysical Institute at UAF. Melina lived in New England for nearly 10 years, and has also lived in Mexico, Uruguay, and Russia.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Opening Ceremony - Friday 6:00 PM
Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM

Rhina P. Espaillat, Dominican-born and bilingual, has published poetry, essays and short stories in both English and her native Spanish, as well as translations. She has been the recipient of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, The Nemerov Prize, the Oberon First Prize, and several awards from the Poetry Society of America, the New England Poetry Club, the Robert Frost Foundation and the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Culture and Education. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Formalist, Measure, Poetry, Review: Literature & Arts of the Americas, and The Hudson Review, as well as in some fifty anthologies and many websites. The most recent of her eleven collections are Playing at Stillness and Her Place in These Designs.

Midge Goldberg

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

Midge Goldberg lives in Derry, NH. Her poems have appeared in Measure, First Things, Dogwood, Alehouse 2008, Cadenza, Rhyming Poems, and other publications. She was a finalist for the 2008 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her first book of poetry, Flume Ride, was published in 2006 by David Robert Books. She has an MFA from the University of New Hampshire, is a member of the Powow River Poets, and is a founding member of the Hyla Brook Poets.

Jeffrey Harrison

The Names of Things: Poetry by Jeffrey Harrison - Saturday 10:00 AM

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry — The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001), and Incomplete Knowledge, (Four Way Books, 2006)-- as well as of The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, published in England by the Waywiser Press in June 2006. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Ernest Hilbert

Legendary Misbehavior: Ernest Hilbert reads from his new book,
Sixty Sonnets - Saturday 2:30 PM

Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. He was educated at Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly and studied with Jon Stallworthy and James Fenton. He later became the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City. He is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist. His poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the New Republic, the New Criterion, American Poetry Review, and The American Scholar.

Luisa Igloria

Intimacy Deserves a Closer Look: Poetry, History, Memory, and the Colonial Encounter: Poetry by Luisa Igloria - Saturday 11:30 AM

Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Luisa Igloria's poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective. Luisa A. Igloria is an associate professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. The winner of numerous national and international creative writing awards, she is the author of nine other books. Juan Luna’s Revolver is her most recent book of poems and won the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry.

Don Kimball

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

Don Kimball is the author of the chapbook, Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications 2008). His poetry has appeared in The Formalist, The Lyric, The Blue Unicorn, and various other journals and anthologies. In 2007, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won two first prizes and a second prize in national contests sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.

Anne Mulvey

Closing Distance: A Mother/Daughter Collaboration in Poetry,
by Melina Draper - Saturday 1:00 PM
Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

A resident of Newburyport and Professor Emerita at UMass Lowell, Anne Mulvey is a long-time member of the Powow River Poets. Anne has had poems published in Abafazi, The Bridge Review, The Community Psychologist and in community newspapers and grassroots publications.

Marilyn Nelson

Operation Homecoming - Saturday 1:00 PM

Marilyn Nelson’s recent books include Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Fortune’s Bones (2005), Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2007) (with Elizabeth Alexander), The Freedom Business (2006), and A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005). Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, three National Book Award Finalist medals, the Poets' Prize, the Boston Globe/Hornbook Award, a Newbery Honor medal, two Coretta Scott King Honor medals, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, the Lion and Unicorn Award for Excellence in Poetry for Young Adults, and the American Scandinavian Foundation Translation Award. Nelson is an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, and founder/director of Soul Mountain Retreat.

Alfred Nicol

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM
Legendary Misbehavior: Ernest Hilbert reads from his new book,
Sixty Sonnets - Saturday 2:30 PM

Alfred Nicol is the author of Winter Light, recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. A member of the Powow River Poets, he was editor of The Powow River Anthology, published in 2006. His poetry has appeared in Contemporary Poetry of New England and in numerous journals, including Poetry, Commonweal, The Formalist, New England Review, The Dark Horse and Cimarron Review. The manuscript of his new book, Elegy for Everyone, received The Anita Dorn Memorial Prize and will be published in 2009. Alfred lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM
Intimacy Deserves a Closer Look: Poetry, History, Memory, and the Colonial Encounter: Poetry by Luisa Igloria - Saturday 11:30 AM

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines, and holds degrees from Ateneo de Manila and Columbia Universities. His poems and translations have appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Poetry International, Runes, and Two Lines; and are forthcoming in Crowns and Oranges: An Anthology of New Voices in Philippine Poetry. A former fellow at the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City, Philippines, he is a two-time recipient of the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club.

Toni Treadway

Polyphony - Saturday 4:30 PM

Toni Treadway was born in the era of nuclear power but raised in a fissioning family. She is finding in poetry a means of using her experiences to bring together the scattered pieces, or at least to hold up and cherish them.

Deborah Warren

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM

Deborah Warren’s poetry collections are: The Size of Happiness (2003, Waywiser, London), runner-up for the 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize; Zero Meridian, which received the 2003 New Criterion Poetry Prize (2004, Ivan R. Dee); and Dream With Flowers and Bowl of Fruit, which received the Richard Wilbur Award (2008, University of Evansville). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review.

Daniel Waters

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM

For the past three years, Daniel Waters has served as the Poet Laureate of his home town of West Tisbury, Massachusetts. A two-time winner in the Newburyport Art Association Poetry Contest, he won the 2005 Westmeadow Press Chapbook Contest and the 2008 Bright Hill Press Chapbook Contest. His work is a regular feature of Yankee Magazine and the Cape and Islands NPR stations, and his latest collection, Skunk Night Sonnets, should be available this spring.

Richard Wollman

Coffee with the Poets - Saturday 8:30 AM
The Names of Things: Poetry by Jeffrey Harrison - Saturday 10:00 AM

Richard Wollman is the author of Evidence of Things Seen (Sheep Meadow Press 2006), A Cemetery Affair (Finishing Line Press 2004), and An Art of Need (forthcoming, Sheep Meadow Press). Winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, his work has appeared in New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, and MARGIE. He teaches literature and creative writing at Simmons College.