Journey Daily with a Compelling Poem

Nature can help soothe many wounds.

Sharon Foley’s poems have received honors and awards from Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Wisconsin Writers Association and The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Common Ground Review, White Pelican Review, Bellowing Ark and The Aurorean. Her first collection of poetry, What is Endured, was published by Finishing Line Press 2017. She lives in Milwaukee.

Music and song can be found everywhere.

Ralph Stevens lives and writes on Little Cranberry Island on the coast of Maine, in the small community of Islesford, a beautiful and congenial place for the reading and writing of poetry. He is retired after a long career as an English professor, most recently on the faculty of Coppin State University in Baltimore. His two poetry collections are At Bunker Cove from Moon Pie Press and Things Haven’t Been the Same from Finishing Line Press. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has poems in a variety of publications along with readings on The Writer’s Almanac and Poems from Here, a production of Maine Public Radio.

Brilliant Amaryllis-red can help brighten the gray landscape of winter.

Connie Wanek is the author of four books of poetry and one book of short prose. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and Missouri Review. She co-edited, with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro a comprehensive historical anthology of Minnesota women poets, called To Sing Along the Way (New Rivers Press, 2006) Her many awards include the Willow Poetry Prize, the Jane Kenyon Poetry prize and Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States (2004-2006) named her a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress for 2006.

She lives with her family in Deluth, Minnesota, where she has worked at the public library and as a restorer of old homes.

“Amaryllis,” first appeared in Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, 2016, University of Nebraska Press.

The simplest of things can become quite complicated!

Kim Dower, City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (October 2016 – October 2018), has published four collections of poetry, all with Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars, described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, which Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, calls exuberant, sexy and sobering.” Nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, Kim’s work has been featured in Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, and Rattle. Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series,) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, (Tia Chucha Press.) She teaches Poetry and Dreaming in the B.A. Program of Antioch University and Wake Up Your Prose for UCLA Extension. You can connect with Kim through her website:  www.kimdowerpoetry.com.

Our mothers will always be with us.

Kim Dower, City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (October 2016 – October 2018), has published four collections of poetry, all with Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars, described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, which Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, calls exuberant, sexy and sobering.” Nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, Kim’s work has been featured in Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, and Rattle. Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series,) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, (Tia Chucha Press.) She teaches Poetry and Dreaming in the B.A. Program of Antioch University and Wake Up Your Prose for UCLA Extension. You can connect with Kim through her website:  www.kimdowerpoetry.com.

Stories can survive years beyond the people who record them.

Connie Wanek is the author of four books of poetry and one book of short prose. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and Missouri Review. She co-edited, with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro a comprehensive historical anthology of Minnesota women poets, called To Sing Along the Way (New Rivers Press, 2006) Her many awards include the Willow Poetry Prize, the Jane Kenyon Poetry prize and Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States (2004-2006) named her a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress for 2006.

She lives with her family in Deluth, Minnesota, where she has worked at the public library and as a restorer of old homes.

“Abstract,” first appeared in Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, 2016, University of Nebraska Press.

Life is a series of conversations covering the important and mundane.

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California-Davis (Ph.D).   His work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published six volumes of poetry with Press 53: Exit, pursued by a bear; This Miraculous Turning, Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions;  Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle .

With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina's Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). He has also edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He won the 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network for his essay, "On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie." In 2015, he won the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for This Miraculous Turnin

“We’ve Had This Conversation Before,” first appeared in The Miraculous Turning published by Press 53.

Don't be afraid of the wide world!

Matthew Zapruder (1967) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. He is the author of four collections of poetry, his first book, American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) won the Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize and his second collection, The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was co-founder and editor-in-chief of Verse Press, which has since become Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, where he is an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing, as well as editor at large for Wave Books.

Music can be heard everywhere if we would simply listen.

Ralph Stevens lives and writes on Little Cranberry Island on the coast of Maine, in the small community of Islesford, a beautiful and congenial place for the reading and writing of poetry. He is retired after a long career as an English professor, most recently on the faculty of Coppin State University in Baltimore. His two poetry collections are At Bunker Cove from Moon Pie Press and Things Haven’t Been the same from Finishing Line Press. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has poems in a variety of publications along with readings on The Writer’s Almanac and Poems from Here, a production of Maine Public Radio.

As children grow up and move away, the change can be painful.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is winner of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP, the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us. She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and director of the creative writing program/professor of English at Binghamton University-SUNY.  She has published 23 books, including What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books, 2016) and Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017). Visit her website at www.mariagillan.com

“What I Can’t Tell My Son,” is in The Silence in an Empty House, New York Quarterly Books, New York, NY.

Knowing if what you feel is love or not is complicated.

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (BA), the University of New Mexico (MA), and the University of California-Davis (PhD).   His work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published six volumes of poetry with Press 53: Exit, pursued by a bear; This Miraculous Turning, Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions;  Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle .

With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina's Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). He has also edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He won the 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network for his essay, "On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie." In 2015, he won the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for This Miraculous Turning.

“How You Know,” first appeared in Love and Other Collisions published by Press 53.

The faces of our past are reflected in the next generation.

Greg Kosmicki is a poet and retired social worker and is the author of four books and eight chapbooks of poetry and his poems have appeared in numerous prestigious magazines and journals. His most recent collection of selected poems, Leaving Things Unfinished: Forty-some Years of Poems is forthcoming in 2020 from MWPH in Fairwater, WI, Tom Montag editor. He received artist’s fellowships from the Nebraska Arts council in 2000 and 2006 and two of his poems were featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997, which he now serves as Editor Emeritus. He lives in Omaha Nebraska.      

Memories with lifelong friends repopulates the old town.

Larry Smith graduated from Muskingum College in Ohio and earned an MA and PhD at Kent State University He taught at Firelands College-Bowling Green State University and in 1980 he was a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Sicily. He is the author of eight books of poetry, two books of memoirs, six books of fiction, two literary biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese with co-translator Mei Hui Huang. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Two of his film scripts on authors James Wright and Kenneth Patchen have been made into films with Tom Koba and shown on PBS. He is professor of English and humanities at Firelands College (1970-2010) and is director of the Publisher, Bottom Dog Press, Inc.

Enjoy time on the Midway since life is unpredictable.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is winner of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP, the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us. She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and director of the creative writing program/professor of English at Binghamton University-SUNY.  She has published 23 books, including What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books, 2016) and Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017). Visit her website at www.mariagillan.com .

“Going to the World’s Fair, 1964” first appeared in The Silence in an Empty House, New York Quarterly Books, New York NY

Connections are not always easy to find.
Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective. He runs poetry programming for the State Department, working in Nepal, Romania, Botswana and Belarus. Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his poem “Notes For My Daughter Against Chasing Storms” and his work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. The author of Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (The Backwaters Press, 2006) and The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2013), Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.

We must trust and accept vulnerability to fully breathe.

Larry Smith graduated from Muskingum College and earned an MA and PhD at Kent State University He taught at Firelands College-Bowling Green State University and In 1980 was a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Sicily. He is the author of eight books of poetry, two books of memoirs, six books of fiction, two literary biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese with co-translator Mei Hui Huang. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Two of his film scripts on authors James Wright and Kenneth Patchen have been made into films with Tom Koba and shown on PBS. He was professor of English and Humanities at Firelands College-Bowling Green State University (1970-2010) and is director of the literary Publisher, Bottom Dog Press, Inc.

Flowers in his wife's long hair is mesmerizing.

Steve Kronen's collections are Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer (Eyewear), Splendor (BOA), and Empirical Evidence (University of Georgia Press). His work has appeared widely in the US and the UK. His many awards include an NEA, three Florida Individual Artist fellowships, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the James Boatwright Poetry Prize from Shenandoah magazine, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Steve works as a librarian in Miami where he lives with his wife, novelist Ivonne Lamazares. His website is www.stevekronen.com.

Each life is precious no matter how small.

Twyla M. Hansen served a five-year term as Nebraska State Poet from 2013 to 2018, is a co-director of the website Poetry from the Plains: A Nebraska Perspective, and has conducted readings and creative writing workshops through Humanities Nebraska since 1993. Her newest book of poetry, Rock • Tree • Bird (The Backwaters Press 2017), won both the 2018 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West and the 2018 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry from the Nebraska Center for the Book. She has six previous books of poetry, and her writing is published in the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), Poetry Out Loud Anthology, Prairie Schooner, Midwest Quarterly, Organization & Environment, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, and many more.

“Warbler,” first appeared in the book: In Our Very Bones (A Slow Tempo Press, 1997)

A mother never wants to hear an explosion inside the house.

Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poem, and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories. Marquart’s work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation. She is Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, and teaches in ISU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program. Her next book, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2021.

“Kablooey is the Sound You’ll Hear,” can be found in the anthology, Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence.  Eds. Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader. Beacon Press, 2017: 112-113.

A speeding car can bring a greater death any day.

Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems. Marquart’s short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories drew on her experiences as a former road musician. A singer/songwriter, she continues to perform solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two CDs.  Marquart’s work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. The Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Marquart teaches in ISU’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Her next book, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2021.