Mary Kathryn Arnold's poetry has
appeared in The Antigonish Review, The New Compass (online) and The
Fiddlehead. In 1997, Rye Hill Press of Philadelphia (PA) published her
chapbook of poems, September Fruit. Her poetry was awarded an Honorable
Mention in Canada's 2007 Atlantic Writing Competition. She works in a bookstore
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she's also studying to become a librarian. Mary Kathryn Arnold is the editor of RHYTHM Poetry Magazine.
Meredith Bergmann is a sculptor who for over 25 years has been making work that deals with complex themes in an accessible, beautiful and stimulating way. She works on both public monuments and on a private scale. She seeks out public commissions that explore issues of history, race, human rights, disabilities and the power of poetry and music. Her private works often involve visual and verbal puns.
Barbara Crooker's work has appeared in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Highlights for Children, and The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA). She is the recipient of the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and has been a twenty-four time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Radiance, her first full-length book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; her new book, Line Dance is just out from Word Press.
 | photo William Pelham, courtesy of Poets.org | Josephine (Boylan) Jacobsen was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1908: prematurely, while her parents were on vacation, and was raised in Long Island, New York, until her father died when she was five. Her mother relocated to different towns on the East coast so frequently that Josephine had no formal schooling until the age of 14, when she enrolled in Baltimore's Roland Park Country Day School. Although she did not go on to college, her experience at Roland Park and with private tutors served as a foundation for a distinguished literary career, during which she published poetry, essays and reviews (often for The Baltimore Sun), and short stories. After graduating from high school in 1926, she joined a Baltimore theater troupe, the Vagabond players, and maintained an interest in theater throughout her life.  | photo courtesy of The Library of Congress | In 1932, she married Eric Jacobsen, and happily remained with him until his death in 1995. While raising her only child, Erlend, Jacobsen gained writing time during residencies at the Yaddo and MacDowell writers' colonies and during winter vacations to the Caribbean. Although she steadily published poetry books with small presses from the 1940s into the 1960s, her work gained recognition with her appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971, when she was 63. She subsequently received many additional honors and awards, including the Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime service to literature, from the Poetry Society of America, 1993; election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1994; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, 1997; and many honorary degrees. She died in 2003.
Elizabeth M. Johnson is a practicing trial attorney in Chicago, specializing in commercial litigation. She studied poetry with Eleanor Wilner as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where she received her B.A. with honors in English Language and Literature. More recently, she has studied formal poetry with Moira Egan at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Athena Kildegaard was born in Wyoming, grew up in
Minnesota, and has lived in Sydney Australia, Chicago,
Austin, Texas, Oxford, Mississippi, New Orleans, Roskilde,
Denmark, and Guanajuato, Mexico. She now lives in Morris
out west there a ways in Minnesota where she directs a
non-profit cultural organization, is a roster artist with
COMPAS/Writers and Artists in the Schools, and
occasionally teaches at the University of Minnesota,
Morris. Her book of fibonaccis, Rare Momentum, was
published by Red Dragonfly Press, a lively independent press in
southeastern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared widely in
journals and a few anthologies including the forthcoming
Letters to the World, coming from Red Hen Press.
April Lindner is an associate professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her poetry collection, Skin, received the 2002 Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. With R. S. Gwynn, she co-edited Contemporary American Poetry, an anthology in Longman’s Penguin Academics series. She lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania.
Ann Michael is the writing coordinator at DeSales University of Center Valley, PA, and the author of three chapbooks, most recently The Minor Fauna (Finishing Line). She's also a librettist, essayist and radio commentator. She lives in eastern Pennsylvania surrounded by domestic animals. Her work has appeared in Poem, Runes, 9th Letter, Natural Bridge, Dogwood, Painted Bride Quarterly, ISLE, and many other journals and anthologies.
Angela O'Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. Her chapbook, Mine, was released in August of 2007 by Finishing Line Press and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House, will be published by Word Press in 2009. Another chapbook of poems, Waiting for Ecstasy, is forthcoming from Franciscan University. Her poems have appeared individually in a number of journals, including America, The Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, The Comstock Review, First Things, Hawaii Pacific Review,Potomac Review, RUNES, Xavier Review, The Cresset, The Pedestal Magazine.com, Die-Cast Garden.com, New Texas, Studio, and Windhover. She has been a finalist for the Foley Poetry Award and the Mulberry Poets' and Writers' Association Award. In addition to poetry, O'Donnell also writes reviews and critical essays on the intersection of faith and art in contemporary poetry, including a recent essay on William Everson.
Joyce Wilson is the editor and creator of The Poetry Porch, a Web site for poets, and teaches English at Suffolk University. Her poems
have appeared in literary journals such as Antigonish Review, Agni, Cyphers,
Harvard Review, and Poetry Ireland. Recently one of her poems won the Daniel
Varoujan Award 2002 from the New England Poetry Club of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and another won the Katherine Lee Bates Award 2003 from the
Falmouth Historical Society. She writes book reviews of poetry regularly for
Harvard Review and The Drunken Boat. The manuscript of her first book of poems is
circulating.
Terri Witek is the author of The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World, Fools and Crows, Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self. She holds the Art and Melissa Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University.
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