LITMIR.BIZ

• Founding editor and publisher of Ausable Press • author of six books of poetry • co-author of best-selling book about poetry, The Practice of Poetry (sold 50,000 copies) • taught at Princeton University • MFA from University of Iowa • received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and an NEA fellowship • poetry influenced by her studies of Zen Buddhism (at Zen Mountain Monastery in NY) • married to novelist Russell Banks • fellow writers very supportive of her work: Dove; Jarman; Harrison; Komunyakaa; Ostricker; Stern; C.K. Williams

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“Abani . . . explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination . . . [he] enters the wound with a boldness that avoids nothing. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal “Stunning poems.” —New Humanist A self-described “zealot of optimism,” poet and novelist Chris Abani bravely travels into the charged intersections of atrocity and love, politics and religion, loss and renewal. In poems of devastating beauty, he investigates complex personal history, family, and romantic love. Sanctificum, Abani’s fifth collection of poetry, is his most personal and ambitious book. Utilizing religious ritual, the Nigerian Igbo language, and reggae rhythms, Abani creates a post-racial, liturgical love song that covers the globe from Abuja to Los Angeles. I say hibiscus and mean innocence.I say guava and mean childhood.I say mosquito netting and mean loss.I say father and it means only that.Happen that we all dream, but the sea is only sea.Happen that we call upon God but it is only a breezeruffling a prayer book in a small churchwhere benches groan in the heat . . . Chris Abani was born in Nigeria in 1966 and published his first novel at sixteen. He was imprisoned for his writings, and after his release he eventually moved to the United States. He is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction, including the best-selling novel GraceLand. He teaches at the University of California-Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.

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“Davis is as good as DeLillo at playing off our internal hunger for meaning against surface senselessness. And Davis catches the surface brilliantly.”—American Book Review Punctuated by subversive humor, verbal theatrics, and moments of strange, luminous beauty, Davis’ clear, unsentimental poems are meditations and mediations on contemporary existence and the unreliability of language, emotions, and the memory to gather it all in. Jon Davis, author of five collections of poetry, earned his MFA from the University of Montana. He has received a Lannan Literary Award and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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"Sherwin Bitsui's new poetry collection, Flood Song—a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride."—Poets & Writers “Bitsui’s poetry is elegant, probative, and original. His vision connects worlds.”—New Mexico Magazine “His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible.”—Arizona Daily Star “Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the American landscape. There are junipers, black ants, axes, and cities dragging their bridges. I can hear Whitman's drums in these poems and I can see Ginsberg's supermarkets. But above all else, there is an indigenous eccentricity, ‘a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,’ that you will not find anywhere else.”—Sherman Alexie
Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” he writes, and “bite my eyes shut between these songs.” An astonishing, elemental volume. I retrace and trace over my fingerprintsHere: magma,there: shore, and on the peninsula of his finger pointing west—a bell rope woven from optic nervesis tethered to mustangs galloping from a nation lifting its first page through the man hole—burn marks in the saddle horn,static in the ear that cannot sever cries from wailing. Sherwin Bitsui’s acclaimed first book of poems, Shapeshift, appeared in 2003. He has earned many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and Lannan Foundation, and he is frequently invited to poetry festivals throughout the world. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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• Received MFA from the University of Iowa • Author of over thirty books in various genres, including genre fiction, poetry, and criticism • Sold 100,000 with psychological thriller The Church of Dead Girls • Work has been translated into twenty languages • trained in journalism – a reporter for the Detroit News • fellowships from NEA and Guggenheim Foundation; winner of multiple Pushcart Prizes • two of his novels have become movies • Best Words, Best Order ranks among the finest books written about poetry • story-teller par excellence

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“John Taggart’s poetry is not like music, it is music.”—George Oppen Is Music—a major retrospective of an American original—gathers the best poems from John Taggart’s fourteen volumes, ranging from early objectivist experiments and jazz-influenced improvisational pieces to longer breathtaking compositions regarded as underground masterpieces. There is a prayerful quality to Taggart’s poetry, rooted in music—from medieval Christian traditions and soul to American punk rock. He is also heavily influenced by the visual arts, most notably in his classic “Slow Song for Mark Rothko,” in which he did with words what Rothko did with paint and dye. To breathe and stretch one’s arms againto breathe through the mouth to breathe tobreathe through the mouth to utter inthe most quiet way not to whisper not to whisperto breathe through the mouth in the most quiet way tobreathe to sing to breathe to sing to breatheto sing the most quiet way. To sing to light the most quiet light in darknessradiantia radiantiasinging light in darkness. To sing as the host sings in his house.   John Taggart is the author of fourteen books of poetry and two books of criticism. He was, for many years, a professor of English and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Shippensburg University. He lives near Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.

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“Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites–for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.”–Salon.comIn Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined–from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe–Harrison calls his readers to live fully in a world where “Death steals everything except our stories.” In Search of Small Gods is an urgent and imaginative book–one filled with “the spore of the gods.”Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren’t harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . .Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall and Shape of the Journey. A long-time resident of Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.

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“Classically elegant.”—The New York Times Book Review Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." —Publishers Weekly “Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect.”—Boston Review "Sze…here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events....His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture....His poetry is an experience of awakening and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have." —Library Journal "Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze's poems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematic recording of a flower's blooming…Sze has a refreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writing like a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole." —Booklist A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendor. “Each hour teems,” Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world’s miraculous and mundane—a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed—into a moving, visionary journey. Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky,poured chocolate into jars and interred themwith the dead. A woman dips three bowls intohair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipatesremoving them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.When samba melodies have dissipated into air,when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished,what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration? Arthur Sze, one of America’s leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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• Skoog is well-connected younger poet • Published in a dizzying range of magazines and journals, from Poetry to Forklift, Ohio • Skoog owns a house in New Orleans, and was out of town when Hurricane Katrina hit. “I was at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference when the storm was gathering,” he notes, “Those were the worst days of my life.” He still owns the house in New Orleans, “to retain a stake in the city.” • Sections of book are set in the urban South (New Orleans); the Heartland (Kansas); and the West Coast (California) • Skoog is one of those discoveries that make reading contemporary poetry a rich and rewarding activity

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• Identical twin brother of Matthew Dickman, who was published last season through the APR/Honickman Award • Dickman brothers were featured in articles in New Yorker and Poets & Writers

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