Joe Milford Show  

James Harms is the author of five books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press, After West (2008), Freeways and Aqueducts (2004), Quarters (2001), The Joy Addict (1998), and Modern Ocean (1992), as well as a letter press, limited edition volume, East of Avalon (2000) from Caddis Case Press. The Joy Addict has just been reissued in the Classic Contemporary Series. His poems, essays and short stories have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Verse, The North American Review, Oxford American and many other literary journals; in addition, he is a contributing editor of West Branch. Harms has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, fellowships from the West Virginia and Pennsylvania Arts Commissions and three Pushcart Prizes. He was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at West Virginia University, where he is currently Professor of English; he also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. Since arriving at West Virginia University he has been named a Benedum Distinguished Scholar, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher, The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher, and The Carnegie Foundation/CASE United States Teacher of the Year for West Virginia. During the spring semester of 2008 he served as Poet in Residence at Bucknell University. James Harms lives in Morgantown, West Virginia with his wife Amanda, and their children.

John Poch is poetry editor of the journal 32 Poems. His first book, Poems (Orchises Press), appeared in 2004. His work has appeared in many journals, and in 2004, he was a Howard Nemerov Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches at Texas Tech University.

David E. Oprava writes, because he has to. He is terrified of what will happen otherwise. It makes him prolific. He has been in over sixty journals online and in print and his first full-length book of poems VS. was released in October 2008 by Erbacce Press. He is also the founding editor of the tiny poetry press, Grievous Jones. When he isn’t writing he is battling against his raging sobriety and trying to live up to the high moral expectations of husbandhood, fatherhood, and humanhood. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily succeeding.

Dave Smith is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including, most recently, The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (Louisiana State University, 2000); Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry (University of Illinois, 1996); Fate’s Kite: Poems 1991-1995 (1996); Cuba Night (Quill, 1990); three books of criticism; and two works of fiction. Among Smith’s many honors are fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, an Award of Excellence from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, the Prairie Schooner Reader’s Award, and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for which he was twice a finalist. Smith is editor of the Southern Messenger Signature Poets series of Louisiana State University Press and for many years was co-editor of Southern Review. He is presently Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University and has previously taught at the University of Utah; the State University of New York at Binghamton; the Summer Creative Writing Program at Bennington College in Vermont; the University of Florida; Virginia Commonwealth University, and Louisiana State University. He taught Elizabeth Morgan and Gregory Donovan.

Alan Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poems: After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981), The Courtesy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Happy Hour (University of Chicago Press, 1987) which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Mixed Company (University of Chicago Press, 1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, The Dead Alive and Busy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University, Song and Dance, which Houghton Mifflin published in February, 2002, and which won the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, as did his next collection, Tantalus in Love (2205). His most recent book, Old War, appeared in 2008; and new book, Night of the Republic, is due out from Houghton Mifflin in 2011. Shapiro is the author of three books of prose, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1993), The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997, and Vigil (Chicago, 1997), a memoir about his sister’s death from breast cancer, and winner of the New England Bookseller’s Discovery Designation. The poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro has published (with Oxford) a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus and The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.

David Lehman grew up in New York City, the son of European refugees. His father came from Furth (near Nuremburg, in Bavaria); his mother in Vienna; they met in New York City and married in 1941. After attending yeshiva (Jewish day school) and then Stuyvesant High Schhol, Lehman went to Columbia University. Upon graduating he spent two years in England on a Kellett Fellowship at Cambridge University. A second grant permitted him to live briefly in Paris. When he returned to New York, he became Lionel Trilling’s research assistant at Columbia, where he worked toward a PhD in English (1978). He left academe in 1981 to pursue a career as a freelance writer. He wrote articles and reviewed books regularly for Newsweek and often for other magazines and newspapers. In 1988 he initiated The Best American Poetry and continues as general editor of the annual anthology. The most recent of Lehman’s books of poetry are Yeshiva Boys (Fall 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), both from Scribner. Both The Evening Sun (2002) and The Daily Mirror (2000) are “journals in poetry” consisting of poems from the five-year period when Lehman wrote a poem a day as an experiment. His earlier books include An Alternative to Speech (1986), Operation Memory (1990) and Valentine Place (1996). He has written six nonfiction books, most recently A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, Fall 2009). He is also the author of The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday), Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Simon and Schuster), and The Perfect Murder (University of Michigan Press), among other books of nonfiction. Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003), and several other collections. In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan’