DICK DAVIS

Rhyme
Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, (1945), and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature). He is currently Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. He lived for eight years in Iran, as well as for periods in Greece and Italy. His twenty-one books include academic works, translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse), and books of poetry. His most recent book of poetry is A Trick of Sunlight, Swallow/Ohio (2006).

DANA GIOIA

Blank Verse   

Poet, critic, and best-selling anthologist, Dana Gioia is one of America 's leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. He has published three full-length books of poetry including Daily Horoscope (1986); The Gods of Winter (1991), chosen by London 's Poetry Society Book Club as its main selection; and Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of the American Book Award. Gioia's critical collection, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992/2002) was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the “Best Books of 1992.” Gioia's 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. He is also a longtime commentator on American culture and literature for BBC Radio. Author of the libretto for Nosferatu (2001), an opera created with composer Alva Henderson, Gioia's poem, “The End,” was recently set to music by award-winning composer Ned Rorem. In February 2003 Gioia was appointed by President George W. Bush as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of California, he lives in Washington with his wife, Mary, and their two sons.

RACHEL HADAS

Dramatic Monologue

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where she has taught for many years. IN addition to teaching poetry in Rutgers's new MFA program, Rachel loves ot teach such
undergraduate courses as Mythology in Literature, Children's Literature, and Literature and Medicine. Among the most recent of her many books are a new volume of poems, The Ache of Appetite (2010), and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton 2009), a compendious collection of translations which she coedited.  A prose work is due out at the end of this year: Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry.

H.L. HIX                                                                  Experimental Form                                                                   H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His recent books from Etruscan Press include a collection of essays on poetry, As Easy As Lying, an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words, a poetry collection, Chromatic, that was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, and God Bless, a “political/poetic discourse” built around sonnets and sestinas and villanelles composed of quotations from George W. Bush.

ANDREW HUDGINS                                                         Master Class

Andrew Hudgins has published six books of poetry, and one critical book, The Glass Hammer, in the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series. His most recent book of poems is Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (Overlook Press, 2009), illustrated by Barry Moser. American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is forthcoming in 2010.  He is Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University.

Mark Jarman is the author of several collections of poetry, including Questions for Ecclesiastes, winner of the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Black Riviera, winner of the Poets’ Prize.  His most recent collections of poetry are Epistles and To the Green Man.  He has also published two books of essays about poetry, The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul:  Essays on Poetry.  He has been a Guggenheim fellow in poetry, and is Centennial Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.  In 2009 he was made an Elector of the Poets’ Corner at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.  Sarabande Books will publish his new and selected poems, Bone Fires, in 2011.

Charles Martin is a poet and translator. His verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid was published in November of 2003 by W.W. Norton and Co and was winner of the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets for 2004. His most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, published in July 2002 by the Sewanee Writers’ Series/ The Overlook Press, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. His other books of poems include Steal The Bacon and What The Darkness Proposes, both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He is currently on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program and the School of Letters of The University of the South. He served as Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York from 2005 to 2009.

DAVID MASON  

Repeating Forms

David Mason’s books include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Poetry Society of America’s DiCastagnola Award), Arrivals, and a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry.  His verse novel, Ludlow, won the Colorado Book Award and was named “Best New Poetry Book” by The Contemporary Poetry Review. With Mark Jarman he co-edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. With the late John Frederick Nims he co-edited Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (fifth edition 2005). And with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke he co-edited both Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. He teaches at The Colorado College. His memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010.

CHELSEA RATHBURN

Writing and Revising in Form

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of Unused Lines (Aralia Press, 2004) and The Shifting Line (University of Evansville Press, 2005), which won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, and The Cincinnati Review, among other journals and anthologies, and her honors include a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of Miami, Florida, she currently lives in Atlanta.

A.E. STALLINGS                                                                     Sonnet

A.E. Stallings studied Classics at the University of Georgia and at Oxford University. She has published two volumes of poetry, Archaic Smile, which received teh 1999 Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax, which received the 2008 Poets' Prize. She has also received the 2008 Benjamin H. Danks award from the American Academy of Arts and Lettes. Her work has twice apeared in The Best American Poetry series and is widely anthologized. Her verse translation (in rhyming couplets!) of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, is out from Penguin Classics. She recently received an NEA translation grant for work on the Medieval Cretan Epic, The Erotokritos, a touchstone of modern Greek literature. Stallings has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999.

TIMOTHY STEELE 
Meter
Timothy Steele's most recent book of poems is Toward the Winter Solstice. His previous collections include The Color Wheel and Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970—1986. He is also the author of two books of literary criticism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and The Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches at California State University.

DIANE THIEL

The Poetic Line

Diane Thiel is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction and pedagogy, including Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize), Resistance Fantasies, and The White Horse: A Colombian Journey.  Thiel’s translation of Alexis Stamatis’s American Fugue (which received an NEA International Literature Award) appeared in 2008.  Her work appears in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, is re-printed in over 50 major anthologies, and has been translated widely.  A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a Fulbright Scholar, she is Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico.  She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Sewanee.

LISA WILLIAMS

Narrative

Lisa Williams is the author of Woman Reading to the Sea (W.W. Norton, 2008), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), selected by John Hollander for the May Swenson Award. She was awarded the Rome Prize in 2004. Her poems have appeared in Measure, The Southwest Review, Orion, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to Present, Best American Poetry 2009, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds.   Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Hollins Critic, and on Poetry Daily. Originally from Nashville, she is NEH Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Centre College in Kentucky.