LyR 2002 Finalist and Semifinalist Contributor Notes
Mary Jo Bangwas born in Waynesville, Missouri and grew up in St. Louis. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from Westminster University (London), and an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. She has published three books of poems. Apology for Want (University Press of New England, 1997) was awarded the Bakeless Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; Louise in Love (Grove, 2001) received an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (University of GA Press, 2001) won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Individual poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Paris Review, Best American Poetry 2001, and elsewhere. She has been a poetry editor at Boston Review since 1995 and has taught at Yale University, The New School, and the University of Montana. In 1999-2000, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Martine Bellen'sthird collection of poetry, The Vulnerability of Order, was published this past summer by Copper Canyon Press. Her previous collection, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, (Sun & Moon Press) won the National Poetry Series Award. Places People Dare Not Enter (Potes & Poets Press) was her first collection. She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Fund for Poetry Fellowship, and the American Academy of Poets Award. She is a senior editor of the literary journal, Conjunctions. Ms. Bellen has taught at numerous colleges and universities, including Hunter College, New York University, Hofstra University, and Brooklyn College. She received an MFA from Brown University.
Ciaran Berrywas born in 1971 in Dublin, Ireland. He grew up in Connemara and Donegal and currently lives and works in New York City. His poems have appeared most recently in The Crab Creek Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and Atlanta Review.
George Dickerson'spoetry has been published in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Pivot, Rattapallax, Medicinal Purposes Literary Review, and on Big City Lit. He was first-prize winner in the Fall '99 LyR competition in New York. His poems have also won first prize in the 2001 Medicinal Purposes Literary Awards and second prize in the 2001 Marilyn K. Prescott Awards. His short stories have been in The Best American Short Stories of 1963 and 1966. Dickerson has been on the editorial staffs of The New Yorker, Story, (The Editor), Time (Contributing Editor), Rattapallax (founding Editor-in-Chief), and Big City Lit (Senior Consulting Editor). He was Head of Press and Publications for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) and involved in security for the UN in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. Dickerson has also been an actor, appearing in movies, including the roles of Detective Williams in Blue Velvet and Doc Goldman in After Dark, My Sweet, and on TV as Commander Swanson in Hill Street Blues, among many other roles. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Alfred Dorn is the former Vice President of The Poetry Society of America and the author of two collections of poems, Voices from Other Rooms and From Cells to Mindspace (Somers Rocks Press, 1977). His work has appeared in some fifty magazines, including Amelia, Blue Unicorn, The Edge City Review, Ekphrasis, The Formalist, Hellas, The Hudson Review, Iambs & Trochees, Light, The Lyric, The New Criterion, Orbis (England), Pivot, and Sparrow. He has won many awards in national and international poetry competitions. Since 1980 he has directed the contests sponsored by the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets.
Alice B. Fogel's"Variation 11: Moon in water" is from a series of one "aria" and thirty "variations" on Bach's Goldberg Variations in sound, "feel," abstract interpretation, use of multiple voices (canon), and form. Each poem has two 16-line (bar) parts and in some way deals with a threshold state demonstrating the predicament of embodiment versus spirit which is at the core of both music and mortality. Ms. Fogel is the author of two books of poetry, Elemental and I Love This Dark Word, and publishes regularly in journals and anthologies (Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, TriQuarterly,etc.) She has been the recipient of awards, including a fellowship from the NEA.
Zoe Forney is a graduate student and teaches with the English Department at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. She spent a month last summer at the Vermont Studio Center. Forney says New York is a mystery to her, although she has looked at it thousands of times from the Jersey side of the Hudson.
Denise Galangis both the Philippine archipelago of her parents' birth and the New York metropolis of her own birth. When not reading Langston Hughes with the seventh-graders in Sunset Park, Queens, she is reading, writing, listening to jazz, salsa dancing, traveling, or sipping strong coffee and conversing with friends and family.
Richard Levineteaches at a junior high school that was closed by New York State in 2001. Nonetheless, the same students and teachers find their way there each day, and social dysfunction and academic apathy continue to blossom. When not at work, he prefers the company of a dog or a good guitar to that of most people. Last year, one of his long poems, Snapshots from a Battle, was published as a special edition chapbook by Headwaters Press. Thus far in the 21st century, his poems have appeared in Big City Lit, Comstock Review, Lucid Stone, Medicinal Purposes Literary Review, Mind the Gap, North American Review, poetz.com, Rattle, SOLO, Tamarind, and Thema. In 2001, he was a finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, which is sponsored by North American Review. In 2000, he was offered a Vermont Studio Center grant. In 1999, he won first prize in the half bubble off plumb poetry contest sponsored by the now defunct journal, Eratica. That same year, he was a semifinalist in the Discovery/The Nation Poetry Competition sponsored jointly by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation, and was also a semifinalist for a New Millennium poetry award.
Mark Nickels'spoem, "Firecraft," was a fourth-place finalist at LyR 2000, and his "Haunts" was named Outstanding Semifinalist Poem (Craft). His other awards include 1st Prize in Dyer Ives Foundation Poetry Competition and 1st Prize in the Milton Dorfman Prize (1998). He has published individual poems in Asylum, Medicinal Purposes, Rattapallax, and elsewhere. His first book-length collection, Cicada, published by Rattapallax Press (2000), garnered this praise from poet Jim Harrison: "Nickels deserves to be read. He has a good shot at being major." Originally from Michigan, he lives in Brooklyn.
Bertha Rogers'spoems and critical reviews have appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Many Mountains Moving, Connecticut Review, Laurel Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Chelsea, Pivot, Yankee, Poetry Bay, Rattapallax, and Big City Lit, as well as in several anthologies. Her poetry collections include Sleeper, You Wake (Edwin Mellen, 1991), For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (Six Swans Artists Editions, 1999), and A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Literary Society and Review Competition (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, MD, 2000). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was published in 2000 (Birch Book Press, Delhi, NY), and her interdisciplinary "Beowulf" exhibits with readings and workshops are touring in the Eastern U.S. during 2001 and 2002. Rogers has held residency fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Hedgebrook Foundation for Women Writers, Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat (Scotland), and the Julia and David White Artists Colony (Costa Rica). In October 2001, she was one of two poets invited to represent the United States at the International Poetry Festival in Trois Rivières, Quebec. From 1999 through 2001, she served on the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Panel. She is the founding director and editor-in-chief of Bright Hill Press and administrator of the New York State Council on the Arts Literary Curators web site, www.nyslittree.org. A lecturer in English at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, she has also been for many years a poet and visual artist in residence for arts in education programs in schools, colleges, and workshops.
Roger Sedaratis an Iranian-American poet currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Tufts University. His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and at TheIranian.com web site.
Pete Wolf Smith's poems and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Peace Review, Jews, Maverick Press, Long Shot, Visions, Mudfish, Chiron Review, Black Buzzard Review, Salonika, Living Text, Medicinal Purposes, Confluence, Synaesthetic, Vital Pulse, and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his poem "Zum and Jesse," which appeared in Maverick Press/Terrapin; and he was a winner of the 1998 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for his poem "1944." His work also appears in An Ecstasy of God: A Tribute to Abraham Joshua Heschel, and a forthcoming anthology on the biblical figure of Miriam, edited by Enid Dame. He is married to Claire Wolf Smith and they live in New York City. His third-place LyR poem, "Lentils," first appeared in the April 2001 issue of Big City Lit.
Hannah Steinlives and writes in Davis, California. Her two books of poetry are Earthlight, a collection, and a chapbook, Schools of Flying Fish. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Poetry Flash, and The Yale Review. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have won national awards. Her poem, "The Waterfall," received its premiere performance in February, 2002, as a song for soprano and wind quintet by Lawrence Frank. Stein teaches poetry workshops at the Davis Art Center.
Gyorgyi Voros is a poet, writer, and scholar living in Blacksburg, Virginia. Currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hollins University, she has an MFA from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. from City University of New York. Voros has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Boulevard, Parnassus: Poetry in Review; Shenandoah; and Terra Nova: Nature and Culture. She is the author of Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (U Iowa P, 1997) and is working on a book about metaphors deriving from ecology and the environmental movement in contemporary poetry and the visual arts. The poems published here are from a manuscript entitled Unwavering.
Rob Wright's poem, "Cantus for the Horses," was honored at LyR 2000 as "Outstanding Semifinalist (Reach)," and singled out by Tim Scannell in his review in The Small Press Review,of that year's anthology, Water to Wine to Waterford®, as "an arresting epiphany, moving from pastoral to justified anguish—an essence of war obliquely captured." Nearly a dozen of Wright's poems have since appeared in Big City Lit, whose editors nominated "Krishna Waits in the Car" for a Pushcart Prize in 2001. Trained in film and photography, he lives in Philadelphia.