Faculty in Poetry

Faculty publications available online from

the University of Southern Maine Bookstore

Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (Alice James, 2005) and The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008), and a novel, Quinn’s Passage, named Best Books of 2005 by Chronogram magazine. His poetry and essays have appeared in many national literary journals including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Washington Square, and the New Orleans Review and in Best American Poetry 2007. A former member of the Cocoon Modern Dance Company, Kazim has read his poetry at venues around the country including The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City, Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, and at the Folger Library in Washington, DC. He is the co-founder and publisher of the small press Nightboat Books and is currently assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College in Ohio.

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Jeanne Marie Beaumont's first book, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews as a winner in the National Poetry Series and published by W.W. Norton in 1997. Her second, Curious Conduct, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2004.With Claudia Carlson, she co-edited the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line, 2003). Her poems have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Good Poems for Hard Times, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, The Norton Introduction to Literature, 9th ed., and Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews. Journals in which her work has appeared include Boston Review, Colorado Review, Court Green, Double Take, Harper’s, Manhattan Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Pool, Volt, and World Literature Today, among many others. Her poem “Afraid So” was made into a short film by filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt and was screened at numerous film festivals in 2006, garnering several awards. From 1992 to 2000, she was co-editor of American Letters & Commentary. She has taught at Rutgers University and at The Frost Place, where she now serves as director for the Frost Place Seminar. She also teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

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Ted Deppe was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and presently lives in Donegal, Ireland. He is the author of Children of the Air (Alice James Books, 1990), The Wanderer King (Alice James, 1996), and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Books, Ireland, 2002). His work has been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Commission and the Connecticut Council on the Arts. He has been writer in residence at the Hames Merrill in Stonington, CT (1998-99), the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland (2001-2003), and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (2003-2006). His work has been published widely on both sides of the Atlantic, including Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Agni, Boulevard, and Southern Review. He is the coordinator of the Stonecoast in Ireland program.

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Annie Finch is the author of three books of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, Eve, and Calendars (shortlisted for the ForeWord Poetry Book of the Year award) and many chapbooks, and translator of the Complete Poems of Louise Labé. Her music, art, and theater collaborations include the libretti for two operas. Annie's poetry has appeared widely in such publications as Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, and Yale Review, and in numerous anthologies and textbooks. She is also author or editor of books on poetics including The Ghost of Meter and the influential collections A Formal Feeling Comes and An Exaltation of Forms. Her book of essays, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self appeared in 2005 in the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series, which Annie has coedited with poet Marilyn Hacker since 2006.  In 1997 she founded the international listserv WOM-PO (Discussion of Women's Poetry). She earned a BA from Yale, MA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and PhD in English from Stanford, and is now Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine and Director of the Stonecoast MFA Progam.

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Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry, The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001), and Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006), as well The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, published in England by the Waywiser Press in June 2006. His chapbook, The Undertaking, came out in 2005. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He has taught at several universities and schools, including George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, and College of the Holy Cross

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Gray Jacobik is author of three collections of poetry: The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of The Juniper Prize, nominated for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet’s Prize; The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review Press), winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize; and Brave Disguises (University of Pittsburgh Press), and winner of the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001.  She served as the 2002 Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place and is Professor of literature at Eastern Connecticut State University.

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Charles Martin is the author of four books of poems, including Starting From Sleep: New & Selected Poems (Overlook/Sewanee Writers Series, 2002), What The Darkness Proposes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Steal The Bacon (Hopkins, 1987). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, The Threepenny Review, and in many other magazines and anthologies. In 2004 Charles' new verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was released in paperback by W.W. Norton. It was widely acclaimed and received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets. He has also received critical praise for his translation of the complete poems of Catullus (Johns Hopkins, 1990) and his critical study of Catullus (Yale University Press, Hermes Series, 1992). The recipient of a Bess Hokin Award for Poetry and a 2001 Pushcart Prize, Charles was also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from The Academy of American Poets, and has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  In 2005 he was honored with the Award for Literature by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year he was also appointed Cathedral Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Charles frequently teaches poetry workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, the Unterberg Center of the 92nd Street YMHA and at Syracuse University. A graduate of Fordham University, he holds a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo and is Professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY). He lives in Manhattan and Syracuse with his wife, arts journalist Johanna Keller.

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Shara McCallum is the author of two books of poems, Song of Thieves (2003) and The Water Between Us (1999, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.  She recently completed the manuscript of her third book of poems, “To Enter this Room.”  She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.  McCallum’s poems and personal essays have appeared in such journals as The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Witness.  Over the past decade, her poetry has been featured in more than twenty anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and World Poetry such as New Caribbean Poetry (Carcanet Press, Spring 2007), Gathering Ground: a reader celebrating Cave Canem’s first decade (University of Michigan Press, Spring 2006), The World in Literature: 17th Century to the Present: Cultures, Continents, Confluence (Pearson, Fall 2004), and The New American Poets: a Bread Loaf Anthology (University Press of New England, Spring 2000).  Originally from Jamaica, McCallum teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University.  She is also on the faculty of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA program.  She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their two daughters.

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Carol Moldaw’s lyric novel, The Widening, will be published by Etruscan Press in the spring of 2008. She is the author of four books of poetry, The Lightning Field, winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2003), Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001), which was also translated in Turkish and published in a bi-lingual edition in Istanbul, Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998), and Taken from the River (Alef Books, 1993). A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writiing Fellowship, aMoldaw’s work is published widely in journals, included, AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly, among others, and in many anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (McGraw-Hill) and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets (Anchor-Doubleday). Moldaw was born in Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has conducted residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University, and lives in Pojoaque, New Mexico, with her husband and daughter.

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Dennis Nurkse (published as ‘D. Nurske’)is the author of nine books of poetry, including Burnt Island and The Fall (Alfred Knopf), Voices Over Water (Graywolf/FourWay Books), and Leaving Xaia and The Rules of Paradise (both from Four Way Books).  Dennis is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, two NEA poetry fellowships, the Artists Fund award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, an NYFA poetry fellowship, and other awards.  Dennis has taught advanced poetry workshops at the Writer’s Voice and The New School, Brooklyn College MFA, and currently in the Sarah Lawrence MFA program.

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Timothy Seibles is an Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion University. Tim is the author of five books of poetry Body Moves, Hurdy-Gurdy, Kerosene, Ten Miles an Hour, and Hammerlock. An NEA Fellow in 1990, he recently received the Open Voice Award from the National Writers Voice Project. Seibles was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He left there in 1973 to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. He received a BA in English in 1977 and remained in Dallas to teach high school English for 10 years. In 1988 he began his M.F.A. work at Vermont College in Mt. Peleier, Vermont, receiving his degree in 1990. In 1991 he won a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which allowed him to live on Cape Cod for seven months in an environment designed to allow high concentration on one’s work. For two years after that he was the Writing Coordinator of the Work Center, (which involved administering the writers' events). Before coming to teach at Old Dominion he spent a year living and writing in Cambridge. Recently his work has been featured in Red Brick Review, New Letters, Dark Eros, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Artful Dodge and an anthology called In Search of Color Everywhere.

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Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin), Good Trembling (Houghton Mifflin), Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions),When (Sarabande Books), Mulroney and Others (Sarabande Books), Subject Matter (Sarabande Books), and Carthage (The Illuminated Sea Press). He is also the co-author of two books about teaching poetry: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (Heinemann). Baron’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Paris Review, The New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Baron is director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry andTeaching and the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Maine.

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Other faculty who teach Poetry include

Richard Hoffman (bio under Creative Nonfiction)

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