WCU Poetry Conference Poetry House
Director: Michael Peich
Coordinator: Jamie Smith
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
610-436-3235 poetry@wcupa.edu
Kim Addonizio's latest collection of poetry, What Is This Thing Called Love, was published by W.W. Norton in Janurary, 2004. Since then, she has published two novels: Little Beauities (2005 Simon & Schuster) and My Dreams Out in the Street (2007 Simon & Schuster). Addonizio is the author of three previous books of poetry from BOA editions: The Philosopher's Club , Jimmy & Rita , and Tell Me , which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. She has been awarded two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dick Allen’s seventh collection of poetry, Present Vanishing, will be published by Sarabande Books in October, 2008. Sarabande also published his two previous works, The Day Before: New Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series five times, in The Best American Spiritual Writing twice, and in scores of other national poetry anthologies. He has received a Pushcart Prize and NEA, Ingram Merrill, and Robert Frost Poetry Writing Fellowships, among many other honors, including awards for his college teaching. His poetry, split almost evenly between formal and free verse, has appeared in hundreds of periodicals, including The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New Criterion, Poetry, Hudson Review, Georgia Review, APR, Triquarterly.
DICK DAVIS This workshop is currently full
Blank Verse 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).
Moira Egan has an MFA from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her manuscript for the Austin Prize. Her first book, Cleave (WWPH, 2004), was nominated for the National Book Award and was a finalist for ForeWord Book of the Year. Egan's poems have been included in several anthologies, including Kindled Terraces; Lofty Dogmas; Discovering Genre: Poetry; and Best American Poetry (2008). Her work has appeared in translation in Nuovi Argomenti and Lo Straniero (Italy) and in Hbula Stirati (Malta). She was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2004), as well as the Writer-in-Residence at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in Valletta, Malta (2006). She lives in Rome.
RHINA ESPAILLAT: Co-leader Poetry in the Classroom Rhina P. Espaillat has published seven full-length books and three chapbooks. She is the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the Wilbur Award, the Nemerov Prize, three of the yearly awards given by the Poetry Society of America, several awards from the New England Poetry Club, and the “Tree at My Window” Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, as well as awards from the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Culture. In addition to her poems, short stories and essays in English, Espaillat writes in her native Spanish, and has published translations in both languages, notably of Robert Frost and Saint John of the Cross. Her two most recent books are a bilingual collection of poems and essays, Agua de dos rios, published in 2006, and El olor de la memoria: cuentos/The Scent of Memory: Short Stories, a bilingual collection of stories published in 2007 by the Dominican Center for Bibliographical Studies, Inc.
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.
Poet, scholar, editor, and literary critic R.S. Gwynn
was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948.
He is the author of No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 from Story Line Press, as well as four other collections including The Narcissiad (1982) and The Drive-In (1986). Gwynn is also the editor of the Pocket Anthology series from Penguin Academics/Longman and New Expansive Poetry from Story Line Press.
His poems appear in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including The Made Thing: Contemporary Southern Poetry, Sound and Sense, Western Wind, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism, and The Book of Forms, and he has also been a frequent contributor of reviews to the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review. He currently teaches at Lamar University.
H.L. HIX Repeating Forms 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.
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.
Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 26, 1946. Her books include The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; Magnificat (1994); The Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; Mama's Promises (1985); and For the Body (1978); all published by Louisiana State University Press. She has also published two collections of verse for children: The Cat Walked through the Casserole and Other Poems for Children (with Pamela Espeland, 1984) and Halfdan Rasmussen's Hundreds of Hens and Other Poems for Children (1982), which she translated from Danish with Pamela Espeland. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award. Since 1978 she has taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she is a professor of English.
MOLLY PEACOCK This workshop is currently full Master Class Molly Peacock is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic , The Paris Review, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge” has toured in the US and Canada , including a limited run Off Broadway. Former President of the Poetry Society of America, she is co-creator of Poetry in Motion on the nation's subways and buses. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States , Molly Peacock teaches poetry one-to-one and lives in Toronto with her husband, Professor Michael Groden.
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.
J. Allyn Rosser’s new collection, Foiled Again, won the 2007 New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published this Fall by Ivan R. Dee. Her previous books are Misery Prefigured, and Bright Moves. She has received numerous other awards for her work, among them the Peter I.B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J.Wood and Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Ohio Arts Council and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared recently in Slate, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Georgia Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2006. Rosser has taught at the University of Houston, the University of Michigan, and Vermont College, and currently teaches at Ohio University.
TIMOTHY STEELEThis workshop is currently full 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.
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), which won the May Swenson Poetry Award. Williams was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where she was awarded a Henry Hoynes fellowship in poetry and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She received a M.A. from the University of Cincinnati, where she was awarded an Elliston Poetry Fellowship and the Elliston Poetry Prize. Williams' poems have recently appeared in The Southwest Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Cincinnati Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Measure, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to Present, and on Poetry Daily. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, she is Associate Professor of English at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.
