News & Events 2003-2004

Third Biennial Poetry Fest Comes to Blair

On Saturday, September 20, 2003 Blair Academy hosted the Third Biennial Poetry Fest sponsored by the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission in partnership with Blair and the Warren County Freeholders. The special one-day event featured Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell and Li-Young Lee, along with Jim Haba, Charles H. Johnson, Anne Marie Macari, Nancy Mercado, Judy Rowe Michaels, Edwin Romond and Jack Wiler. Many of these writers have achieved national notoriety and received awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and American Book Award. Workshops, readings, panel discussions and book signings occured throughout the day.

Biographical Notes on Poets

Jim Haba is the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Poetry Director. In this role, he has designed, organized, and produced all nine biennial Dodge Poetry Festivals, the largest poetry events in North America. He also designed and continues to direct the Dodge Poetry-in-the-Schools Program. In addition to editing The Language of Life, the best-selling book that accompanied the 1995 Bill Moyers television series of the same name, he served as Poetry Consultant for this series and seventeen other PBS programs.

Marie Howe is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series, while her second volume, What the Living Do, was named one of the five best books of poetry published in 1997 by Publisher’s Weekly. She is co-editor of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Charles H. Johnson is the Night Editor and poetry reviewer for the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, New Jersey. His first collection, Tunnel Vision, was published by Warthog Press earlier this year. A first place winner of the 1998 Allen Ginsburg Poetry Award, he has published work in Connecticut Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Rockhurst Review, American Tanka and The New York Times.

Galway Kinnell received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1980 volume, Selected Poems. Among his other books are Imperfect Thirst, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, The Book of Nightmares, Body Rags, and, most recently, A New Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published translations of works by Francois Villon, Yvan Goll, Yves Bonnefroy, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.

Li-Young Lee is the author of three books of poetry: Rose, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, The City in Which I Love You, the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection, and Book of My Nights. His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His other honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.

Anne Marie Macari won the APR/Honnickman first book prize in 2000 for Ivory Cradle. She has been published in Field, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review and numerous other journals. She is on the core faculty of New England College’s Low Residency MFA Program and has taught at the Prague Summer Program. Her second collection will be entitled Gloryland.

Nancy Mercado is the author of It Concerns The Madness (Long Shot Productions). Her work has been anthologized in Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American, and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002. She is currently pursuing a doctorate at Binghamton University.

Judy Rowe Michaels is Poet-in-Residence at Princeton Day School and a Poet-In-The-Schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She is the author of two books about writing with high school students, Risking Intensity and Dancing with Words, and a book of poems, The Forest of Wild Hands (University Press of Florida). In both 1996 and 2003, she received Distinguished Artist Fellowships for Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives in Hillsborough, New Jersey.

Edwin Romond is the author of three books of poetry, Home Fire (1993), Macaroons (1997) and Blue Mountain Time: New and Selected Poems about Baseball (2002). His work has appeared in journals such as The Sun, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Zone 3 and Poet Lore. He has received poetry fellowships from both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts and, in 1994, from the National Endowment for the Arts. He recently retired after 32 years in public education as an English teacher and counselor.

Jack Wiler has worked at a blood distribution center, managed a senior citizens’ lunch program, and sold weight lifting supplies. His book, I Have No Clue, was published in 1996. He served as the editor of the Hoboken-based journal Long Shot for six years, and has recently been a group leader for the Dodge Foundation’s Clearing the Spring/Tending the Fountain seminars for high school teachers. He recently moved back to WenonahÑthe southern New Jersey town in which he grew up.

For more information, please log on to www.wcchc.org

Return to 2003-2004 Table of Contents