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.