Mark Strand's bio is available at The Academy of American Poets.



 

I work as an Associate Professor of English at UC Davis.  I have a wife and a four year-old daughter. Hallucination and Privilege, is part of a book of essays that is forthcoming from Verse Press in Fall 2005.

My most recent book is The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books, 2003; Finalist, PEN/Winthrop Award; Nominee, Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Award; 2005 Pushcart Prize). It follows Ode to the Cold War: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 1997). I have new poems also recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Notre Dame Review, Gettysburg Review, Agni, among others. More informally, I recently took early retirement from college teaching in order to write poetry full time, drive each year around America (especially to Kansas and beside the Pacific Coast sea stacks), and listen to baroque and country music. I live with my wife, poet L.N. Allen, in a small cottage near Thrushwood Lake, in Connecticut, with three cats, 12,000 odd books, and a great many Zen Buddhist symbols. Here and there, I give poetry workshops and readings, but mainly I tend to be reclusive and spend my days trying to find and write poems. Although Grandfather isn’t about me (I’m not a grandfather, just a father), it was written following a small heart attack. An obsessive theme in my poetry is the search for calm, for a way through the vicissitudes of our future-battered world. “Grandfather” tries to capture how it feels to survive this time. It’s all in the sideways motion. Describing this motion was one of my main tasks.

I am the authour of two books of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard, and two books of essays, Mongrel and Burden of Ashes.  Two Answers... was written in the waiting room of California Pacific Medical Centre's Outpatient Physical Therapy Unit and was finished at Male Image Barber Shop.

I live in Salisbury, NC— "home of Food Lion." The Women Who Was Born In The Bottom Of A River is about a woman from my childhood and the area's history. It was very exciting to interview Mark Strand, I admire his work and it gave me the opportunity to mention and question Louise Gluck, who is also a wonderful poet.

I was born in Havana, lived my childhood in Spain and came to the US by myself at age 10. Since then, I have called Miami home and have to come to love its climate, nightlife and cultural diversity. If you could fit the planet in one city, this would be it. My family and I currently share our home in Palmetto Bay with two cats, a dog, and a bearded dragon. I hold a degree in Electrical Engineering, with a minor in Nuclear Engineering. My artwork and poetry has spread from friends and family to the rest of my little earth here in South Florida. My artwork has been featured on local television, and several of my poems have found their way into Mipo, and South Florida Poetry books. Life is good. Life is always good.  Helen At Forty Something was inspired by a woman who sat across a table from me, in a crowded room. Her current name and age remain a mystery to me, but her eyes betrayed her true identity.<visit web site>

I have written several books including Why They Grow Wings published by Silverfish Press in 2000, The Book of Orgasms, published by Cleveland State University Press in 2000, Any Kind of Excuse published by Kent State University Press in 2003, and The Book of Orgasms and Other Tales, published in 2003 in an expanded edition by Bloodaxe Books in England. I am also the editor of a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux, entitled, Someone Wants to Steal My Name. My book, Sleeping with Houdini, will be published by Tupelo in 2005.  Bee God and Bees are from my new manuscript, Southern Comfort, an autobiographical collection. My father kept bees when I was young. These two poems are about my memories of him and his bees.

I live in Muncie, Indiana with my wife, son, and dog. We’ve got a nice life and I’m essentially happy here. Barnwood Press is publishing the anthology I’ve edited, Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on the Books that Shaped Their Art. My poems have been published in different journals, including in, most relevantly, MiPOesias. My poem, Uneasy Postcards is one of a number of postcard poems I’ve written. This poem was probably first sent to Martha Kinney, who was likewise sending me her own postcard poems. I like anything that reminds me of roller skating. Especially roller skating when I was a kid.

I love butterflies and bubble baths. My favorite solo artist is Elton John. If I were an animal, I would be a bunny because they're so fuzzy and bouncy. I dream about Care Bears every night. I consider myself the luckiest man in the world for having a super cool wife who can kick my ass. Duke rox.

I live in central Jersey, with my wife, Dara, and son, Jonah. I have an MFA from NYU, and poems have been in Antioch Review, Fence, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and others. In addition to writing, I practice a sitting qigong, which keeps me happy. In You Joking With Perspective, I was desperate in love and the other was interested enough to find it amusing, sometimes. College, abroad, so isolated and focused and in that situation a lover can seem to have the power of a god. The person in the photo is actually a good friend, but for the purposes of the poem, she got conflated with someone else. So it goes.

Regarding Undressing Josephine, I am working on a series of poems trying to explore how women have been colonized by (American) culture; how the process of mythmaking—of creating icons—palimpsests who we are in all our relief. I think this process is even more extreme as women of color are created in the popular imagination. Josephine Baker seemed to be exemplary of this, caught at the interstices of countries, loyalties, and "responsible" representations.

I was born in Yokohama, Japan, and have lived mostly in the US since the age of six. My first book, So we have been given time  Or, (Verse, 2004) was selected for the 2003 Verse Prize, and my hockey love poems have been collected in Clutch (Tinfish, 2002). On-line publications include Balconic (Duration, 2003), and Nothing fictional but accuracy or arrangement (she (Faux, 2003). I edit Factorial, as well as the Translation section for HOW2. I am a 2003 recipient of the US-Japan Creative Artists Program Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  from Texture Notes is from a series called Texture Notes - observations, findings, commentary on texture. While any sort of accuracy is questionable, the process of getting to some accurate point seems to be worth its own while, too. I am writing most of these from Japan, where I am intrigued by the different methods with which 'values of beauty' might be assigned.

I am a NYC based poet, performer, activist, and educator. My poems have been published, or are forthcoming in, The Cortland Review, Cake Train, Calyx, Kalliope, Phoebe, Runes, So to Speak, Natural Bridge, and 5 AM; and the anthologies The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and Tokens: Contemporary Poetry of The Subway. I am the original founder of the Poet's Open at Club 13, as well as NYU's Emerging Writer's Reading Series, and the Community~Word Project Reading and Mural Tour. Currently, I am the Contributing Editor for Tiferet, and teach independent poetry and performance workshops with Teachers & Writers, Poets & Writers, Poets House, NYPL, and through my company Feiner Poetics. My first collection of poems was Radishes into Roses (Linear Arts Press). Excess is from my current manuscript, You'll Get it When I'm Dead: A Tribute to My Fat Jewish Grandmother.

I was born in Thailand and reared in Texas. My book, The Body, was published in 2002. I have work in The Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and The Next American Essay. I earned my BA and MA at Hollins University and my MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Currently, I am working towards a Ph.D. in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I teach composition at NYC Technical College and experimental essay writing at the New School. A Contributing Editor for Maisonneuve. I also write a bi-weekly literary column for the magazine. My hobbies include knitting and letter writing. I am at work on a new essay collection, as well as assimilating my random poems into a book.  One day, a certain phrase stuck with me: How to Write on Grand Themes. I envisioned a writer's manual with "how to" instructions for all sorts of writing.

My Pushcart Prize nominated poems have appeared in countless magazines, anthologies and e-'zines such as storySouth, Plum Ruby Review, Saucy Vox, Narcolepsy Arms, Sex on the Edge, Literary New York, New Delta Review, Suspect Thoughts, Velvet Mafia, Fifth Street Review, Lynx Eye, Saints and Sinners and tons of others. My books Black Fag (Future Tense Books) and Cock and Balls (Feel Free Press) are out. My favorite pastimes include writing poetry and watching Kung Fu movies on rainy days. I am friends with poet Jarret Keene.  Kin Folks was written after one of my uncles in his drunken stupor informed me that some people in the family knew about my being a homosexual. These scenarios of them sitting around and talking about me began to flood my brain. So out of those thoughts, this 'daisy chain' of gossip and talk was born within this poem.

I live in Santa Cruz, California, nestled beneath San Francisco along the Monterey Bay, where I serve as Chief of Children’s Mental Health for the county. My work has recently appeared in journals such as Eclipse, Freshwater, Raven Chronicles , and Porter-Gulch Review among others. In addition, some of my poems have appeared in several recent anthologies: To Love One Another: Poems Celebrating Marriage, from Grayson Books; and Working Hard For The Money: America’s Working Poor in Poem & Story from Bottom Dog Press; Pagan's Muse by Citadel Press; and My Heart's First Steps by Adams Media.  My sense of place, and my profession, obviously shape At The Entrance Of Santa Cruz Wharf. I have stood and contemplated this wonderful sculpture many times at the entrance to our wharf. The symmetry and violence inherent in the two granite spheres reflect some of the inherent tension, and wonder, I experience in a life full with two children, a two career family, a pace that engenders speed but gravitates towards the serenity at the center of it all. And of course, as a therapist, the infusion of a certain attention (much like poetry) that allows the possibility of healing in life's contrariness.

Me he dedicado por entero a la pintura y a la poesía. Destaco en mi obra la belleza de la mujer junto a la hermosura de naturaleza.  El paisaje está ahí a nuestro alrededor, para admirarlo, pero usualmente nos pasa inadvertido. Cuando pinto, vivo el color, la variedad de tonos. Mantengo la serenidad, mientra disfruto y adecúo mi idea en lo que describo. Como si interpretara una canción una danza. Amo la Naturaleza. Creo en su mística, de ella dependemos para todo. Desde luego, amo la vida y el respeto por la mujer. Pretendo con mis pinturas hacer feliz a los demás. Porque yo al pintar soy feliz.

I have a collection of poems, Brothers of Morning, published by Deerbrook Editions, of Cumberland, Maine. New poems are appearing in The Progressive, The American Scholar and Poetry International. I was a Finalist in the 2003 Emily Dickinson Awards in Poetry, with two poems chosen for the anthology as part of that competition, published by Universities West Press late last year.  Other poems have appeared in the premiere edition of Chautauqua Literary Journal, American Poetry Review, Dogwood and the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times and in the anthologies Poetry Comes Up Where It Can: Poems from the Amicus Journal (University of Utah Press, 2000); Motion: American Sports Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2001), and The Maine Poets (Downeast Books, 2003).  Poems I write are gifts, and A Brief History Of Time is doubly so, because not only did what I like in the writing come in a way like channeling, but it couldn’t have been written without the extraordinary gift of the experience itself with eight others on that dock during a writing residency at Blue Mountain Center, in the Adirondacks, on which the poem is based.

Get Over Myself is one in a sequence of poems in progress titled NINE-ELEVENS: each has nine verses of hendecasyllabics, 11-syllable lines. Some of them are written in Spanish, where the rules are different. My partner, the poet Rebecca Parfitt, had told me to "get over yourself." I wondered how I might follow her suggestion. If I could get so bootstrap, maybe. Does anyone in the audience have an Indian Rope? Neat trick if you can do it, good work if you can get it. <web site>


 

I am Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and author of three collections of poetry—The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires, Ten Pins, Ten Frames, and the forthcoming Glass Is Really Liquid—all from Front Room Publishers. My work has also appeared in Jacket, Xcp: Streetnotes, Explosive Magazine, Shampoo, can we have our ball back?, Aught, Word For/Word, and other journals.  In Blend, I try to play with the dichotomies of cause and effect, self and other, fluidity and rigidity, union and division, dependence and independence. The parallel structure, I hope, extends an invitation to break the regular linear order of the poem through the random marriage of top and bottom clauses.

I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C. area most of my life. I started Gargoyle Magazine back in 1976 and it’s still going strong 28 years later. Work is nearing completion on issue #50. A late bloomer, most of my time these days is divided between my daughters aged 2 and 4, part-time teaching at Johns Hopkins, and various editing projects. I’ve published Sugar Mountain, a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an ebook, and co-edited six anthologies with Lucinda Ebersole including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, and Conversations with Gore Vidal (forthcoming 2005). I also solo edited A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation for Serpent's Tail Press. <visit web>  Why I Find Myself At Gymboree? Being an older first-time father and a stay-at-home dad for almost two years did some serious rewiring to my brain. I met a lot of resistance in my initial encounters with mom’s groups.

My poetry appears in Verse, Maverick (online), Poet Lore, and The Chattahoochee Review. My first manuscript, Short Waves, won the 2002 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Award. Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems, my second collection of poetry, was published in Winter 2004 by Handwritten Press. Currently I'm teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at Grand Valley State University. My wife, Diane, and I live in Hudsonville, Michigan.  John Berryman in my Dreams: I sat up late one night, listening to a tape of John Berryman reading his work. When I went to sleep, I still heard his voice: pinched, nasally, affected New England accent mixed with a mild Southern lilt. I love The Dream Songs and wanted to get the sense in the poem that there's (tragically, sometimes comically) no way out of them in the end, that Berryman couldn't get out, try as he did.

I am a native of Massachusetts, but have lived in Florida for twenty years. I taught writing for several years at the University of Central Florida and then became a grant writer, first for an opera company and now for a homeless shelter. My first book of poems is Underwater City, published this year by University Press of Florida. My second collection, Luckily, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. I have new poems forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diner, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Heliotrope, Luna, Pilgrimage, Poet Lore and others.  The Objects Everyone Dreams began with a dream. I had a sense of so much I couldn’t remember, & the forgetting reminded me of the Jewish story that begins the poem. It also reminded me that everything I've chosen is always with me.

I was born into a poor, Southside Chicago family. My father died when I was a boy, leaving my mother to raise 4 children. With the help of scholarships, loans and jobs, I worked my way through college, ending up with degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Chicago Divinity School. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college since they came to the U. S. from Europe. I then became a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, advancing there to become a department chairman and a labor union leader. In 1997 I was ethnically cleansed and banned from the college by the chancellor. I wrote about this experience in my book A Winter of Words. I continue to teach at Roosevelt University and live in Chicago and New Orleans. My books, among others, include American Shadow and Child's Play. They are available from Amazon. Headwaters/Hudson Press released my multipart poem, "The Accomplishment of Metaphor and the Necessity of Suffering (In the Modernist Style)," in chapbook form during the summer of 2004.

I have lived over half my life in France and consider myself to be an alter-native rather than an ex-pat, and began to write halfway through my forties. Until that time I had been occupied with raising a family and owning and running a restaurant with my husband in Paris. Participating in the Paris Writers Workshop in 1992, renewed my interest in my mother tongue's language and poetry. After we sold the restaurant, I applied to Bennington and spent 2 wonderful years reading and writing. I have had recent work published by Pharos and Upstairs at Duroc in France, Tears in the Fence and Orbis in the UK , The Chariton Review, Four Corners in the USA. I have also begun to translate some of the French poets who I admire: Jean Tardieu, Raymond Queneau, and Jacques Prévert; LIT magazine is publishing some this fall, and a prose piece is forthcoming in 2005 in The Threepenny Review. I have co-directed the Paris Writers Workshop since 1998.  Letter from Mlle Paris to the Marquise de Montague, 1800 was inspired during a pilgrimage to the Picpus Cemetery in Paris where the Marquis de Lafayette and his wife Adrienne de Noailles' graves hug a stone wall. Behind the wall, is a simple lawn under which are the remains of 1,306 victims guillotined during of the French Revolution. 

I am a teacher. My students threatened that they would not write a word unless I wrote with them, so I did. Thanks to them I am a writer. I hold an MFA from Bennington College Writing Seminars and have had poems included in the DC Poets Against the War Anthology, articles about teaching and poetry published in The Washington Post Magazine and Rethinking Schools and have received a Larry Neal Award from the DC Commission on the Arts. I am looking forward to the day I can write as freely and honestly as the young people I work with.  How to Listen to Boleros is a poem written for my grandfather who sits on New Years Eve and listens to records he has collected over the last 60 years. He plays them in the same order every year and sips on a drink allowing the music to take him back to days when his living room would fill up with people dancing.

I recently completed an MLIS (Library Science) degree at the University of South Carolina. My poems have been published in places as Big Bridge, call: review, can we have our ball back?, 88, effing magazine, eratio, 5_Trope, Lost & Found Times, moria, nth Position, pettycoat relaxer, Shampoo, Tin Lustre Mobile, Unpleasant Event Schedule, UR*VOX, VeRT, Word For/Word, xStream, Znine and others. Effing Press (Austin, TX) will publish my first print chapbook, Artificial Lure, in December 2004, and xPress(ed) (Finland) is set to release an e-book collection, entitled Familiar Bifurcations, during the same month. I am  also the creator and managing editor of sidereality, an online journal of speculative and experimental poetry. Visit my blog called word placements.

I live in Carrboro, North Carolina, where I divide my time between drawing and bicycle riding. My first collection of poetry, tentatively entitled MAKE IT WAVY, will be published by Oyster Boy Review in the Spring of 2005.  Dinnertime is based upon a now forgotten by everyone mid 1970’s movie, as well as a few other slightly veiled movieisms: Luc Besson’s THE PROFESSIONAL and George Pal’s 1960 THE TIME MACHINE. Also, there really was a Madeleine Vionnet. And she looked nothing at all like Plato or Einstein. One of her greatest contributions to the world of fashion was the handkerchief dress.

If a person lives long enough she gets to do a lot of interesting things. I have 13 books of poetry published and 20 plays produced. The latest play is about an ex-slave quilt maker who was an undiscovered genius. My forthcoming book What I Would Do For Love is about 18th century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, another genius who was unappreciated in her own time. Part of each of us, I believe, wants to be a public person, to further the work of others, if we have such a passion. From this motivation, I co-founded a radio station in DC (WPFW-FM) which is still going strong and on which I hosted a weekly radio program :The Poet and the Poem. In 20 years I interviewed 2,000 poets. I now broadcast the program from the Library of Congress, distributed via NPR satellite; it is entering its 28th year. As for my personal life, I have four grown daughters. My husband through all these many years is sculptor Kenneth Flynn.  Regarding Am I Afraid To Be A Woman Of Significance?, I am interested in writing pieces about women in history who took the hard path and overcame enormous adversities— and endured cruelty—so they could be heard. Mary Wollstonecraft lived from 1759-1797. She was the first woman to write a book in English that was argumentative prose, not romantic slush.

I've had poetry published in Skanky Possum, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, POep, and Shampoo. In 2000, I published a chapbook called Hand Held Hive, which was reviewed in The St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. For several years, I co-edited the poetry journal Tool a Magazine with Erik Sweet. I am returning from a poetry sharing/reading/editing respite. Tracks & Paths is about commuting along the Hudson River, lost memory, baby-envy and my admiration of  Rosemarie & Keith Waldrop. It was written while taking the Amtrak between Albany and Poughkeepsie, NY.

In early 2004, I was named one of the “best new southern poets under thirty” by storySouth but I have since turned 30 & I don’t know where that leaves me. Other poems have been in Rattle, 5AM, Solo & Cimarron Review, with critical work appearing in New Writing (UK) & Midwest Quarterly. A chapbook of poems, The Happy Seasons, is out from Swannigan & Wright. I am also the editor & sole shareholder of H_NGM_N, a ‘zine of poetry, poetics &c. I’m from Syracuse, NY, but live now in Natchitoches, LA, where I’m an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. You may reach me at nathanpritts at hotmail.com. Regarding Two Truths & a Lie, is it enough to say that I've got a soft spot for party games?  Or should I say also that I like to keep people guessing?
 

I was born and grew up in Holly Hill, Florida, 3.5 miles west of Daytona Beach. My mom claims that the first thing I read was the name “Pantry Pride” off of a shopping cart.  I attended the University of Central Florida on a scholarship from the Distilled Spirits Wholesalers of Florida and received my Bachelor of Arts in creative writing. I’m fortunate to have been co-recipient of a grant from New Forms Florida in collaboration with the Rockefeller Center and the National Endowment for the Arts. My work has earned awards from United Arts of Central Florida and the Liquid Poetry reading series, and can be found in publications including Artspeak, The Asheville Review, and Tabula Rasa. I now live in Altamonte Springs with my beautiful wife and fellow poet Bethany Bower, our children Stone and Jasmine, our dogs Coco and Vivian, and our cats Monday, Friday, Cali, and Chewbacca. I am a senior editor at Harcourt School Publishers and am finishing a first collection of poems tentatively titled Yard of the Month.  Motion and Rest went through a number of revisions and lost its original title, “the population of flowcharts” along the way. That title now has some different words fighting underneath it. For me the music of a poem is essential and guides any revisions. This one smoothed out nicely and the close surprised me.

I like to make poems and teapots. Some of my poetry has been in La Petite Zine, Failbetter, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and elsewhere. I teach ceramics and writing, and manage design projects for a nice company. When I'm not making things, I enjoy folding laundry and laughing about irony. My apartment has an enormous kitchen and is located in Somerville, MA. Packing It Up is about two people—a speaker who admonishes the “you” (her mother) for dishonoring the intimate possessions of her childhood home. Although this situation here is fictional, I became interested in the way that people deal with the collections of their deceased parents after my own grandfather died and I helped to gut one of three garages of “collectibles” he kept during his lifetime.

Since 1971, I have published fourteen books and four chapbooks of poetry and prose including, most recently, Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, 2003). I am a contributing editor to Fulcrum, a member of the editorial advisory board for HOW2 and associate editor of Jacket magazine. I live in Sydney, Australia. <visit web site>  I spent the second half of 2003 living in Trastevere in Rome, Italy. The poem In europe was written a few months after I returned to Sydney.

I'm the author of two collections of poetry: How To (Mid List Press, 2004) and An Alchemy in the Bones (New Rivers Press, 1999). I am a program director with the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA) an I live in St. Paul, MN.  A Constellation arises out of two interests/impulses: one is a non-scientists interest in the stars, the fact that the light we see in the night sky is ghost light from stars long dead; the other is an urge to write a more distilled, simple poetry, one that makes an economic use of language and still finds a way to sing.

I’m a lifelong west-coaster, currently biding my time as an English teacher in a small university town. I co-edit the print journal The Canary, and have recently published poems in LIT, ZYZZYVA, Octopus, Spoon River, Mid-American Review, and other places.  This is the first poem in a series that never quite got off the ground. The title and the italicized phrase come from a Pixies song. I wrote the poem Boxcar Waiting pre-Pixies reunion, so perhaps I was being prescient. Or psychic. Or something. Distance, the threat of violence, erotic desire, and pop music. The usual suspects.

I recently finished an MFA from the University of Arkansas, where I directed the Writers in the Schools program. My work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Insurance, Good Foot, and elsewhere. Currently I'm teaching classes at a community college in middle America and co-edit TYPO, a web based poetry journal.  Two Elegies used to be Ten Elegies. When I wrote this poem, I was thinking about the connection between violence, rivers, and memory.
 

Few people know that I am originally from Bloomington, Indiana. Fewer people know that John Cougar Mellencamp played for my Montessori school class. I moved to New York at age 5 and have been in this area ever since. I’m the author of kickboxer fantasies (boog literature, 2004) and my poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Mississippi Review, Bombay Gin, the tiny, Painted Bride Quarterly, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Puppy Flowers, among others. I work full time, teach at Parsons, and am the co-curator of the Belladonna* reading series and small press. <blog> Regarding to the zoo, I was walking home from Chelsea one day and crossing the street when a policeman stopped me and handed me a weird flier. It reprimanded me for not making sure I was crossing during a “walk signal moment.” I kind of felt like a dog that was curbed by his or her owner.

I was born in Casa Grande, Arizona sometime in the 1970s.  I grew up in the desert, surrounded by cotton fields.  After I received a BA degree from Arizona State University in Chicano/a Studies, I moved to Iowa to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.  And for the first time in my life I ran through real snow-covered fields.  I was disappointed.  The snow in my imagination was brighter, colder. My poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Danta, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Meridian, Mississippi Review & the anthology How to Be This Man edited by Sandra McPherson.  My work has been honored with a New Millennium Writings Poetry Award, & with a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Regarding, Poem Invoking a Nahuatl Spell Against Unruly Ants, for a long time I carried this image in my mind: the moles on my mother's breasts transforming into ants.  It wasn't until I read a Nahuatl prayer that this poem began to take shape.  I came across the prayer in Francisco's X. Alarcon's Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation—a collection containing work translated from Nahuatl into English & lyrics inspired by Nahuatl culture.  The prayer asks the gods to destroy ants.  I was intrigued by the audacity of the prayer: why ask the gods to do something so minor?  This transgression against the Divine begat the transgression in the first stanza: the moment when I pinch my mother's nipple.  And the desperation inherit in most prayers gave me the permission to write the ending.  

I live in Tempe, Arizona, where I teach composition at Arizona State University and film studies at Rio Salado College. Over the past several years, I've worked for Hayden's Ferry Review, ASU's national literary magazine. I recently interviewed the poets C. D. Wright and Lynn Emanuel with my colleague Sarah Vap; we are currently interviewing Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Frank Paino as part of a larger interview project. My poetry has recently appeared in or will appear in Bloom, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, 42OPUS, Folio and Portland Review.  Neurosis A combines imagery from Freud's pathology of the case of the Wolf-Man with fragments of my own childhood memories. I was drawn to notions of a "talking cure;" in the poem, it seems like the voice or presence of a doctor keeps commenting on or complicating the images, as doctors tend to do. 

I live deep in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I started writing years ago as a humor columnist for a small newspaper in the SUV-laden, soccer-mom Mecca of Fairfax County, Virginia. More recently, my stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney’s and Jest magazine. My blog, Peeling Wallpaper, is like a four hundred pound gorilla rattling its cage, demanding to be fed. Shards explores one of my favorite avenues of story-telling: conversations with ourselves. When we talk to ourselves, inhibitions melt away, fantasies come to life and anything is possible.

Having grown up in Miami, I now live in Chicago and constantly long for some loud, ostentatious Cubans to hang out with. My wife, the fiction writer Elizabeth Wetmore, and I expect our first child, a son, in November 2004. I’m at work on several poetry manuscripts, a collection of short stories, and a novel or two. To make ends meet, I teach at Loyola University Chicago, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, and Hebrew Theological College.  Versailles marks the intersection of several important developments in my life: picking up Richard Blanco’s excellent City of a Hundred Fires (Pittsburgh UP, 1997), an immersion into the blues of Mississippi John Hurt, writing my first decimas after learning that my paternal grandfather wrote them, and then seeing a picture online of Richard Blanco cutting it up in front of the famous Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana. Although I ‘ve never met Blanco, I have a great affinity for this fellow Cuban-American’s work. Decimas tend to have two or more stanzas, but mine always seem to have only one. If you’re ever in Miami you shouldn’t miss Versailles; make sure to go very, very hungry.

Initially wooed by the First World War poets & then seduced by the Beats, I have been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15.  Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling, grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia. So I have no prize collection to my name; I have masterminded no radical creative writing programmes in a cutting edge university department; I have edited no recherché poetry magazines with lower case titles. For fun & profit, I teach Drama in a progressive school & play bass guitar & bodhran in an Anglo/Celtic dance band.  If anyone would like to follow up the poem published here, please check out my weblog. I wrote the poem on August 6^th 2003. It arrived as an unbidden response to my realisation that this very ordinary day was the 58^th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  As I recall, I wrote it in one draft & at one sitting, which is unusual for me because I am neither very prolific nor very intensive when working on a piece.