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Stephan Anstey
Rebecca Wright Bilbo
Christine Gelineau
Timothy Gray
Richard Holmes
Ben Lee
Paul Marion
Beverly Matherne
Libbie Rifkin
Mark Schorr
David R. Surette
Stephan Anstey grew up in Woburn, Westford and New Durham New Hampshire with a couple of years in South Africa. After graduating in 1988 he ended up at University of Lowell, where he met and married his beautiful (and amazingly tolerant) bride Ellen, procured 2 (delightfully bizarre) kids who are now both attending Lowell High School then meandered through a decade laying out newspaper pages and ads. Eventually he ended up where he is now: a secret poet and public webmaster at the Massachusetts Bar Association. Has been an on-again (or more often) off-again English Major at UML since the 80s and currently owns a web community for writers called ShakespearesMonkeys.com and publishes a literary magazine 3x a year called Shakespeare's Monkey Revue. As (ir)regular on the Lowell poetry scene for the last couple of years his hoary visage can often be found milling about at open mics and poetry readings.
Rebecca Wright Bilbo was born in 1953 in Syracuse, New York, attended local public schools, Nazareth College of Rochester, the University of Cincinnati, and presently is candidate for the PhD in Art History at Indiana University under Professor Sarah Burns. Associate Professor Bilbo's areas of expertise include American Art, 20th-century Art , African and Caribbean Art, and American Studies. She serves as Art History teacher and Department Chair of Thomas More College, Crestview Hills, Kentucky.
Bilbo's dissertation topic is "The Founding and Early History of the Art Academy of Cincinnati" and some recent conference papers include: “Winslow Homer and the Bahamas,” “Academic Training in a Post-Modern World,” and “Prepare to Believe: Evangelicalism and the Museum.”
Christine Gelineau conceived of the project and, along with Jack B. Bedell, edited French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets (Louisiana Literature Press, 2007). Gelineau is also the author of the poetry collection Remorseless Loyalty (Ashland Poetry Press, 2006), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize. Remorseless Loyalty was nominated by David St. John for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her other works include two chapbooks of poetry from FootHills Publishing, North American Song Line (2001) and In the Greenwood World (2006). Gelineau’s poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Iron Horse Review, Green Mountains Review, Georgia Review, American Literary Review and others. Her poems have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her essay “Foal Watch” is cited as a “Notable Essay” in the 2004 Best American Essays. Gelineau lives on a farm in upstate New York. She teaches at Binghamton University, where she is Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program and coordinator of the Readers’ Series. She also teaches poetry in the low-residency graduate writing program at Wilkes University.
Timothy Gray teaches American Literature and American Studies at The College of Staten Island, CUNY. His interests include the American counterculture, as well as the intersections that exist among various forms of postmodern painting, music, and lyric poetry. He is the author of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (University of Iowa Press, 2006). The paper he is presenting is part of his new book manuscript, "Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School."
Richard Holmes was born in 1945 in Derry, New Hampshire. He attended the local schools in Sandown, New Hampshire and graduated from Sanborn Seminary (1963). He received a bachelor's degree in Education from Keene State College in 1963 and his master's degree in history from Rivier College in 1980. He served with the U.S. Army in Viet Nam (1969–1970) as a medic with a combat battalion.
Since 1985 Holmes has been a member of the Derry Heritage Commission and its chairman since 1995. In 2003 he founded the Derry Museum of History. Since 2004 he has been a regular columnist for the Derry News and a frequent contributor to the Nutfield News, the Lawrence Eagle Tribune and the Manchester Union Leader.
In 2007, Richard Holmes received an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), the most prestigious recognition for achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history.
Nutfield Rambles is his fifth published volume on local history. He is a trustee of the Frost Farm state historical site in Derry and is currently working on a biography of Robert Frost in Derry.
Ben Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches American literature and modern and contemporary poetry. He’s completing a book on experimental poetry and postwar U.S. culture, sections of which have appeared in American Literature and African American Review.
Paul Marion is Executive Director of the Office of Outreach at UMass Lowell. A graduate of UML, he has an M.A. in community social psychology and a B.A. in political science. He also studied n the MFA Program in Writing at the University of California at Irvine. He represents UMass Lowell in its outreach activities and helps establish partnerships in the public and private sectors. He is the author of What Is the City?, a collection of poems and essays about Lowell, and editor of Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac from Viking-Penguin, which has also appeared in Italian and French editions. He has been a featured reader at the Montreal Literary Festival and the Northrop Frye Literary Festival in New Brunswick. He appears as an expert commentator in the new documentary film One Fast Move or I’m Gone, about Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur. His poems and essays have appeared in Slate, Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, YANKEE, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. With his wife and son, he lives in an 1860s house in Lowell.
Beverly Matherne is a poet and professor in the Department of English at Northern Michigan University and former director of its Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. Her fourth collection of poetry, in facing pages of French and English, Le blues braillant (The Blues Cryin’), from Cross-Cultural, is also available in CD format with guitar and fiddle accompaniment and is preceded by three collections of free verse. She translated The Artist (l’Artiste), a portfolio edition of poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, featuring original lithographs by Bulgarian artist Stoyan Tchoukanov, and released at a memorial service for Kunitz at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Matherne did an interview and bilingual reading with Grace Cavalieri on her show “The Poet and the Poem,” read three times in French on CBC Radio Canada Internationale, and read at the United Nations in New York. She has done over 145 poetry readings in English and/or French in the United States, Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, and Wales. Her award-winning work has garnered the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry at the Writing Today Conference in Birmingham, Alabama; three first-place prizes at the Deep South Writers Conference at University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and the Best Submission Award from Sojourn for her translation of a long prose poem by Charles Baudelaire. In addition, she has received five Pushcart Prize nominations.
Libbie Rifkin received her BA from Amherst College and her PhD from Cornell University. She writes about 20th century American poetry and its institutions, with a primary focus on avant-garde poets in the 1950s and 60s. Other research interests include the history of the modern literary archive, masculinity studies, and African American poetry and poetic community at the mid-century. Her book, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), is an institutional history of American poetic ambition in the 50s and 60s and a close reading of some of that era's pivotal innovative poems.
Mark Schorr was born in Chicago in 1944. He attended the local public schools. He attended Grinnell College, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and received a masters and PhD in English and American Literature in 1974. He currently teaches English and American Literature at Cambridge College in Lawrence, MA.
Since 2003, Schorr has served as the Executive Director of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence. In 2004, the Frost Foundation received a Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (MFH) Exhibition Grant for "Robert Frost's Lawrence." In 2005, he organized a series of exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations related to Frost's collaboration with the artist J.J. Lankes. In 2007, the Frost Foundation received its second MFH exhibition grant, for "Lasting Legacies: Early Poems of Robert Frost and Collected Paintings of William Wolcott." In 2008, Schorr is working on a monograph to accompany that exhibition. His most recent poems will appear in Fulcrum 6. He has recently completed the scenario for a ballet on the life of Robert Frost in Lawrence.
David R. Surette’s new book of poetry is Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In, published by Koenisha. His first, Young Gentlemen’s School, was released in 2004. Surette’s poems have been published in literary journals such as Peregrine and Salamander and appear in the anthologies French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets; Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses; and Look! Up In The Sky! - An Anthology of Comic Book Poetry. He co-host Poetribe, a poetry series in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts.