poetry

Since winning Southwest Review’s Morton Marr Poetry Prize in 2008, Lisa Huffaker’s poems have been published in Southwest Review, Poet Lore, Measure, Southern Poetry Review, Mezzo Cammin, The Texas Observer, and Southern Humanities Review, which recently nominated her for the Pushcart Prize. Lisa’s primary background is classical singing; she holds a Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from the New England Conservatory, and has sung with The Dallas Opera since 1999.

J.P. Grasser is originally from Maryland. His work explores the diverse regions he has called home, most insistently his family’s fish hatchery in Brady, Nebraska. He studied English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South and is currently an MFA student in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. His work appears or is forthcoming from The Journal, Cream City Review, Ninth Letter Online, The Collagist, and Nashville Review, among others.

Born and bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio works in New York. He loves music from Bach to Dory Previn, Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. He attends a philosophy workshop on 23rd Street, New York City, and is a fan of foreign film and a student of psychoanalysis. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath as poets. He presently holds an Associate’s degree in liberal arts and has been published in diverse magazines in print and online.

Robert W. Crawford lives in Chester, NH. He has published two books of poetry, The Empty Chair, winner of the 2011 Richard Wilbur Award, and Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man. His poems, “Odds Are” and “The Empty Chair,” won the 2011 and 2006 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. His work has appeared in Measure, The Formalist, First Things, Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, The Lyric, Forbes, and many other journals.

Katharine Coles’s fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen, 2013), was written under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the journal Matrix. Her sixth collection, Flight, is due out in 2016.

Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896), precursor of the Symbolists, composed ten volumes of lushly musical poetry replete with eroticism and subtle moods. His life was a tempestuous sequence of prosperity, poverty, Parisian café society, a violent affair with the young Rimbaud, two imprisonments for assault—including one on his mother—as well as failed business ventures and intervals of teaching in England.

After her Tulsa upbringing and with a psychology degree from Vassar College, Diane Furtney worked a year in Israel (1967), then took an assortment of jobs, sometimes in clinical psychology, in several U.S. cities. Besides nonfiction ghostwriting, she has authored two prize-winning poetry chapbooks (Destination Rooms and It Was a Game) and two comic mystery novels (pseudonym D.J.H. Jones). Her poems and translations (French, Japanese) are in numerous journals in the U.S.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524 – 1585) was for many years the royal poet for the House of Valois, memorializing numerous kings and members of the French court as well as official events and literary figures, including Henri II, Charles IX, François Rabelais, and Marguerite de Navarre. Among the more than one thousand poems he wrote were sonnets on Petrarch, odes after Pindar and Horace, elegies, eclogues, songs, and witty if sometimes dark light verse.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Tar River Poetry and The Huffington Post; in the UK, The TLS, Poetry Review, Agenda, New Walk Magazine, Orbis, and Warwick Review; in Ireland, The Stinging Fly; and in many other publications, including anthologies.

Catherine Chandler is an American poet, teacher and translator.