Poet Biographies - 2008
Jan Beatty
In her third collection, Jan Beatty boldly explores the body - the beauty and ugliness, sensuality and violence that surround our perception of our physical selves. The poems in Red Sugar (University of Pittsburgh Press) burst with Beatty's unique intensity. Beatty, who resides in Pittsburgh, is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She's the recipient of Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. Beatty is co-host and producer of Prosody, a weekly program on WYEP-FM radio, featuring the work of national writers. She was recently named the diretor of the Creative Writing Program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.
Paula Closson Buck
Paula Closson Buck is the author of two books of poems, The Acquiescent Villa (1998) and Litanies Near Water (2008), both from Louisiana State University Press, and has published poems in such journals as Agni, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah and Southern Review. She is also at work on a first novel. A three-time recipient of individual artist fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Closson Buck is an associate professor of English at Bucknell University, where she edits West Branch, Bucknell's nationally distributed literary magazine.
Craig Czury
Craig Czury, grew up in the Wilkes-Barre and Danville areas of Pennsylvania. He spent 15 years hitchhiking North America, working in carnivals, warehouses, canneries, construction crews, restaurant kitchens, organizing community poetry readings. Author of 16 collections of poetry and editor of two anthologies, FINE LINE THAT SCREAMS from his N.E. Pa. Prison Poetry Project, and UN SEGUNDO EN EL TIEMPO/ONE SECOND AT A TIME, poets of the Reading Hispanic community, Czury works as a poet in schools, homeless shelters, prisons, mental hospitals and community centers throughout the world. His poems have been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Lithuanian, Portuguese Chinese, Macedonian, Albanian, and Italian, and he has been awarded many national and international fellowships to continue his collaborative poem fusion performance and poetry mural projects, including a residency at The Playhouse in Derry, Northern Ireland, the 1999 AmeriCorps WritersCorps in Washington, D.C., and an N.E.A. Community Arts Grant for his Berks Poetry Project. A revised and expanded edition of his book, GOD'S SHINY GLASS EYE, poems from the N.E. Pa. coal region with photos by Czury, is available from FootHills Publishing. An avid blues harp and bocce player, Czury has earned an M.F.A. from Wilkes University. He lives in Reading, Pa.
Barbara DeCesare
Barbara DeCesare lives in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, with her three teenagers and her beau. She is the author of jigsaweyesore (Anti-Man Press, 1999), Adrift (Seventh Wave, 2006) and Silent Type (Paper Kite Press, 2007). Her work has been adapted for stage, song and film, and published in such notable literary journals Tarpaulin Sky, Gargoyle, Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Oyez, and Evansville Review. She is a potty mouth and apologizes in advance.
James Harms
James Harms is the author of five books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press, After West (2008), Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998), and Modern Ocean (1992), as well as a letter press, limited edition volume, East of Avalon (2000) from Caddis Case Press. His poems, essays and short stories have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Verse, The North American Review, Oxford American and many other literary journals; in addition, he is a contributing editor of West Branch.
Harms has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, fellowships from the West Virginia and Pennsylvania Arts Commissions and three Pushcart Prizes. Since arriving at West Virginia University he has been named a Benedum Distinguished Scholar, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher (twice), and The Carnegie Foundation/CASE United States Teacher of the Year for West Virginia. He was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at West Virginia University, where he is currently Professor of English; he also directs the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. During the spring semester of 2008 he served as Poet in Residence at Bucknell University. James Harms lives in Morgantown, West Virginia with his wife Amanda, and their children.
Tara Shoemaker Holdren
Tara Shoemaker Holdren is a member of Bloomsburg's River Poets and lives in Millville, PA with her husband and two sons. She also plays guitar and sings in her church's contemporary worship team each week. She teaches high school English and is the advisor for the school's literary magazine. Tara's work has been published in Watershed, Time of Singing, The Press Enterprise, The Daily Item, and Pennsylvania Magazine. Her poem "Samaritan" won the 2008 Mulberry Poets and Writers' award and her collection of poetry Circumnavigation is slated for publication in fall 2008 by Paper Kite Press. Soli Deo Gloria.
Karla Kelsey
Karla Kelsey was born and raised in Southern California. With degrees from UCLA (BA English and Philosophy), the Iowa Writer's Workshop (MFA Poetry), and the University of Denver (PhD), she is now on the creative writing faculty at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.
Karla is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, which was selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. It was published in 2006 by Ahsahta Press. Little Dividing Doors in the Mind, a chapbook, was published by Noemi Press in 2005. Her recently completed manuscript, Iteration Nets, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Work from this book can be found in journals such as Denver Quarterly, the New Review of Literature, Bird Dog, and the anthology Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry.
Along with poetic projects, Karla is involved in essay writing, multi-media performance, editing, and bookmaking. Recent essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Octopus, Five Fingers Review, Slope, and Denver Quarterly. She helps to edit Reconfigurations, an online journal of poetry and poetics; Imprint Press, a bookarts project; and Ponzipo, a collaborative press collective. Her website, www.karlakelsey.wordpress.com, has more information.
Carmine Sarracino
Carmine Sarracino has published three books of poetry, and his work has appeared in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Laurel Review, and on NPR's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His most recent book, The Battlefield Photographer, was published by Orchises Press in 2008. He is the co-author of a cultural study of pornography, The Porning of America, which has just been published by Beacon Press. He teaches Creative Writing and American Literature at Elizabethtown College.
Philip Terman
Philip Terman's collections of poetry are What Survives (Sow's Ear Press, 1993), The House of Sages (Mammoth books, 1998), Book of the Unbroken Days (Mammoth books, 2005), Greatest Hits, (Pudding House Press, 2005), and Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House Press, 2007). His poems and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets Respond to the Holocaust. His awards include the Sow's Ear Chapbook Award and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a co-directs for the Chautauqua Writers' Festival (http://writers.ciweb.org/writers-festival/), and is a poetry editor for the Coal Hill Review (www.coalhillreview.com). Terman teaches creative writing and English at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. He lives in a converted one-room schoolhouse with his wife, Christine Hood, their two daughters, Miriam and Bella.
Heather Thomas
Heather Thomas is the author of seven books of poetry, including Blue Ruby (FootHills Publishing, 2008), Practicing Amnesia (Singing Horse Press, 2000). and Resurrection Papers (Chax Press, 2003), which was also published in Argentina in a bilingual edition. The Fray, an art and poetry collaboration, was created with artist Barbara Schulman. Heather’s poems have been published in anthologies including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and in more than 30 print and online journals including American Letters and Commentary, Chain, 13th Moon, and mid)rib. Associate poetry editor for 5Trope online, Heather also has published literary criticism, journalism, and fiction, and wrote a play produced by the Reading Theater Project. She has awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Heather is an English and creative writing professor at Kutztown University and lives in Reading with the poet Craig Czury.
G.C. Waldrep
Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry) and Disclamor (2007). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, New American Writing, and other journals. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. He presently teaches at Bucknell University where he teaches creative writing and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's poetry has been described as "brilliant and heartbreaking," a survivor of the Liberian civil war, Patricia has used her poetry over the years, seeking to make sense of that bloody war. She is the author of three books of poetry, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, ( New Issues Press & Prose, 1998) Becoming Ebony,(SIU Press, 2003) and The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007). Her awards include a World Bank Fellowship, the Crab Orchard Award for Becoming Ebony, a Pushcart Nomination, among others. She has presented her poetry nationally and internationally. In 2007, Patricia was a guest of the 17th International Poetry Festival of Medellin in Colombia, where she read her poetry with 71 other poets from 56 countries to an audience of up to 7,000. Patricia is currently one of three poetry faculty along with Yusef Komunyakaa and Kwame Dawes for Inaugural 2008 Pan African Literary Forum's (PALF) Writer's Festival in Ghana, West Africa. She has published work in numerous international and American literary journals and magazines, including Transition: An International Journal, the Crab Orchard Review, New Orleans Review, among others. She is a Creative Writing faculty member at Penn State Altoona, and lives near Altoona, Pennsylvania.