Piotr Gwiazda

Piotr Gwiazda is the author of two books, Gagarin Street: Poems (WWPH, 2005) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in AGNI Online, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, PN Review, The Southern Review,  Times Literary Supplement, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere. He was Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut in the fall of 2008. He teaches modern and contemporary poetry at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Here are some sample poems from Messages. And visit Piotr at http://piotr-gwiazda.blogspot.com/


Gregory Hischak



 

Gregory Hischak is a poet, playwright, musician and graphic artist. His writing has appeared in Atlanta Review, Bellingham Review, Exquisite Corpse, Green Mountains Review, Mid-America Poetry Review, Third Coast, The Vincent Brothers Review and Zyzzyva among others. His long-running zine Farm Pulp was widely reprinted, and several issues permanently reside in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. His plays have been staged by the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the Source Festival, Portland Stage Company, City Theatre, and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, among others. His play Crows Over Wheatfield was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize, and his play The Center of Gravity was the 2010 Winner of the Clauder Prize for New England Playwrights. With Robin Clarke he co-curates the Poetry Session reading series in West Dennis, Massachusetts—just down the road from where he lives, works, teaches, and gets by. Here are some sample poems.

Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in East Liberty. After attending Peabody High School he worked as an exterminator, a door-to-door salesman, and steelworker, eventually graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. He has lived much of his life outside the United States, publishing infrequently. He is the author of Views of Jeopardy (1962), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series; Monolithos (1982), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Great Fires (1994), Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006); Transgressions (2006); and The Dance Most of All  (2010). He was married to the American poet Linda Gregg and the late Japanese poet Michiko Nogami, to whom he dedicated a limited edition of elegiac poems published under the title Kochan (1982). He presently lives in Berkley, California. Here are some sample poems from Tough Heaven.

Meredith Holmes

Author of Shubad's Crown (out of print)

Meredith Holmes grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, and graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a B.A. in English Literature. She holds a master's degree in environmental urban studies from Cleveland State University's College of Urban Affairs. She has held a variety of writing and editing positions on newspapers and for publishing companies in the Cleveland area. In the 1970s, she was a member of Big Mama, a feminist poetry performance troupe. Her poems appear in their two anthologies, Big Mama and Big Mama Vol. 2. Meredith Holmes is a member of Night Vision, a poetry workshop that has been meeting monthly and giving occasional readings for 21 years. She was an editor and research project manager in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. Holmes is presently freelancing and focusing on her own writing. She lives with her family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Here are some sample poems from Shubad's Crown.

Mary Ann Larkin
        and
Patric Pepper

Founders of Pond Road Press

Mary Ann Larkin is a poet, writer, teacher and former fund-raising and publications consultant to nonprofit organizations. She is the author of five chapbooks, The Coil of the Skin, Washington Writers' Publishing House; White Clapboard, Carol Allen of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; The DNA of the Heart with Patric Pepper, Pond Road Press;  A Shimmering That Goes With Us, Finishing Line Press, 2005; and gods and flesh, Plan B Press, 2007. Her full length collection, That Deep and Steady Hum, was published by Broadkill River Press in 2010. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poetry Greece and other magazines and on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio, as well as in more than twenty local and national anthologies, including America In Poetry and Loving, a poetry and art series published by Harry Abrams of New York.

She has taught writing and literature in a number of colleges and universities, lately at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her involvement with poetry includes co-founding the Big Mama Poetry Troupe, a group of women poets, who performed from New York to Chicago in the seventies; giving numerous workshops and readings in schools, churches, jails and saloons; and writing for Foundation News, National Public Radio, and The Watershed Foundation, producers of literary radio programming. Before returning to teaching in 1992, she was Director of Major Donor Relations for Africare, a Washington, D.C. organization doing development work in rural Africa. Patric Pepper's  poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications including most recently Confrontations, The Potomac Review, Ekphrasis, Poems Against War, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. Pepper’s chapbook, Zoned Industrial, was published by Poet to Poet, Richmond Hill, New York, in December 2000 as the annual Medicinal Purposes Chapbook Contest winner. His full length collection was winner of the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Prize in 2004. His Poem “Judas Tree” won the 1998 Muriel Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review. Since 2007 Pepper has served as President and Managing Editor of Washington Writers' Publishing House, a nonprofit regional cooperative press publishing poetry and fiction collections since 1975, over 90 to date, in the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas.Here are some sample poems from The DNA of the Heart, by Mary Ann Larkin and Patric Pepper, published by Pond Road Press.