The Poets
Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied literature at Essex University and Trinity College Dublin. An award winning poet, Curtis has published six warmly received collections. The most recent ‘The Well in the Rain: New & Selected Poems’ was published by Arc, 2006. He edited As The Poet Said (Poetry Ireland, 2003) a book of quotations taken from Dennis O’Driscoll’s regular column in Poetry Ireland Review. In 2003 he was awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia. Curtis has been awarded the Irish National Poetry Prize. In 2007, with the designer Conor Clarke, he received The Robert Horne Award. Last year Days Like These was published by Brooding Heron Press in Washington State. A fine art edition, editing and design by Sam and Sally Green. He is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of the arts. He is currently working on his new collection Folk.
Samuel Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby fishing and mill town of Anacortes. After four years in the military, including service in Antarctica and South Vietnam, he attended college under the Veterans Vocational Rehabilitation Program, earning degrees from Highline Community College and Western Washington University (B.A. & M.A.). A 30-year veteran of the Poetry-in-the-Schools program, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms. He has also taught at Southern Utah University, Western Wyoming Community College, and served six terms as Distinguished Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University, including six summers in Ireland. Poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet & Critic, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Puerto del Sol. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 26 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself, and is, with his wife, Sally, Co-Editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the first Poet Laureate for the State of Washington, and in January of 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
Kevin Miller has taught in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-seven years. Blue Begonia Press published his first two collections of poetry: Light That Whispers Morning and Everywhere Was Far. Pleasure Boat Studio published his most recent collection Home & Away: The Old Town Poems in late 2008. Miller has received grants from Artist’s Trust and the Tacoma Arts Commission. He lives in Tacoma and teaches in Olympia.
Ann Spiers lives on Vashon Island. Her most recent publication is from FootHills Publishing Long Climb into Grace, a chapbook in its "Poets on Peace Series." Forthcoming is work from book artist Catherine Michaelis of May Day Press. Brooding Heron Press published her The Herodotus Poems. She serves on the board of Vashon Audubon. She has founded and edited literary journals, has taught in diverse venues from the classroom to the beach. Her poetry and essays are published widely. She graduated from UW with MA in Literature and Creative Writing and a certificate in Environmental Project Management.
Michael Meade is a master storyteller and scholar of mythology who ives on Vashon Island. When it comes to bringing storytelling to bear on one of the most pressing difficulties of our time, the disillusionment and violence to which our youth are prey, he is one of the most creative thinkers of our time. He is the founder of the MOSAIC MULTICULTURAL FOUNDATION, which is currently focused on youth at risk, "genius based" mentoring, and developing the "arts of community" in diverse organizations and groups. For over seven years, Michael has worked bringing the arts of poetry and myth to gang youth, college students, artists, and into prisons and other settings. He is the author of Men and the Water of Life and The World Behind the World and co-editor of The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart .