River Poets

Theme: Exploring the connections between kinds of art and artists 

Valerie Fox is a poet and fiction writer who grew up (by the river) in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and attended Shippensburg University, Temple University, and Binghamton University. Her poetry books include The Rorschach Factory, The Glass Book, and Insomniatic. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose, West Branch, Philadelphia Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly, Juked, Maudlin House, and other journals.  Much interested in collaboration, she recently published The Failed-Love Factory Auction Catalog, a short book of poems, with Arlene Ang. She’s taught writing at many schools, including Drexel University (in Philadelphia) and Sophia University (in Tokyo). Currently she is Managing Editor at New Flash Fiction Review.

MC: David Allan Brooks

Marjorie Maddox is the Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry  including How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay Books), Seeing Things (Wildhouse), and Hover Here (Broadstone Books, forthcoming),   as well as the ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space; Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (both with Karen Elias), and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with daughter Anna Lee Hafer www.hafer.work and others). Maddox also has published a story collection, 4 children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and  Keystone Poetry (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). Her middle-grade biography, A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment, is forthcoming from Sunbury Press. For more information, see www.marjoriemaddox.com

Jerry Wemple is an award-winning poet and prose writer who has published four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. His collection Artemas and Ark: the Ridge and Valley Poems chronicles the lives of two generations living in a small town in the central Susquehanna Valley.   He is co-editor, with Marjorie Maddox, of the recently published anthology Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and its predecessor, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania  Both published by Penn State Press. He also co-edited the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania, released earlier this year by Catamount Press.

MC: Dave Barsky

“Quintessential Czury:
“How can I feel less for not quoting Virgil in Latin when Walt Whitman is a service station on the Jersey Turnpike?”
I gotta say I love your “And If You Saw Me”. It’s a wild ride into the mixta of your life of sidestepping despair and defeat by going somewhere else. No vainglory of greatest hits. Instead it serves up a maze of no deadends where every twist and turn is an aha of pure czur(y). Reading it feels like riding the old Atlantic City Wild Mouse, hanging on for dear life, getting it that life is dear.”

Visit him at www.craigczury.com

MC: Deborah Filanowski