First Night Poet biographies

Words for the New Year
First Night Poet biographies:

Eva Davidson

A practicing poet, Eva Davidson has collaborated on a series of operas with
her sister, composer Tina Davidson. She teaches Creative Writing at Hartwick College.

Kirby Olson

Kirby Olson teaches philosophy and literature at SUNY-Delhi. HIs poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Cortland Review, S. Dakota Review, Poetry East, and many others. His chapbook Waiting for the Rapture was published by Persistencia Press in Rhode Island in 2006. The poems he will read are from a new manuscript entitled PAris is Not the New Jerusalem.

Jo Mish

Jo Mish has been a writer,singer, songwriter, printer, editor and publisher for 40 years. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Letterpress printing and the Book Arts at Hartwick College.

Robert Bensen

Robert Bensen's poems have been published in the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and in African-American and Native American journals. His most recent publications include poems and prose in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (India), an essay in River, Blood, and Corn (a Native American journal), and he will be Featured Poet in an upcoming issue of The Hardy Review (U.K.). Awards for his poetry include an NEA poetry fellowship, the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Poetry Prize, and the Chimera Foundation Award. He has written numerous essays on Caribbean and Native American literature, and has edited three anthologies of those literatures, most recently Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (University of Arizona Press). His poetry has been shown in five gallery exhibitions with photographs by Charles Bremer, most recently in the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY. He is an invited non-Native member of the WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.

Julie Suarez Hayes

Her book of poems, entitled It Does Not, was published by Bright Hill Press (2006, Treadwell, NY) in its Poetry Chapbook Series. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky finds in her poems “inspiration, heart, fidelity, and the informed work of the gardener,” which he says are qualities with which “Suarez presents her distinctive, gorgeous pageant of losses and restorations.” Bollingen Prize winner Frank Bidart wrote that “Rarely has the fact that mortality becomes the air we breathe been rendered with more force. This book is as close to perfect as a group of poems ever need come.” He called it “a…masterpiece.”

Suarez Hayes has been a summer participant in the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College since 1987. Her poetry has been published in Salmagundi and elsewhere, including a book of poems entitled The Lesser Light (Swamp Press, Northhampton MA).

Stephen Rice

Bertha Rogers

More than 250 of Bertha Rogers's poems appear in journals and anthologies, including Barrow Street, The MacGuffin, Nimrod International Journal, The Louisville Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, ONTHEBUS, The Same, Rattapallax, Pivot, BigCityLit, and others. Her collections include Even the Hemlock: Poe(chapbook, Snark Press, IL, 2004); A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press, Maryland Poetry Review Chapbook Contest Winner, 2000); and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, NY 1991). Her translation of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press, NY), and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, will be published in 2010 (Birch Brook Press, NY). Her collection, Heart Turned Back, will also appear in 2010 (Salmon Poetry Publishing, Ireland). In 2006 she was the recipient of an AE Ventures Grant for excellence in both poetry and visual art and for contributions to the field through the not-for-profit literary press and center she founded in 1992, brighthillpress.org. Her word and image works have been shown in hundreds of juried and solo exhibits throughout the US and Europe and are collected in the Harry Ransom Archive at the University of Texas and other private and public collections. In 2007 she was given the 2007 Teaching Artist Distinguished Service to the Arts in Education Field Award by Partners for Arts Education and the Association of TeachingArtists in New York. She serves as program director for the New York State Literary Web Site.

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