2008 Poetry Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Bob Brodsky

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

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

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.

Rhina P. Espaillat

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

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

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.

José B. Gonzalez

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.

A. M. Juster

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

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

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

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!

Johnny Longfellow

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.

Alfred Nicol

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.

Lewis Turco

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

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.