Driftwood Cont Notes

Marie Bahlke was a "late bloomer" of 75, when she wrote her first poem. Now 90 and after a lot of help from a lot of people, she's still writing, albeit a bit more slowly. ONE OAR, her chapbook about her husband and Alzheimer's Disease, won the 2005 Writer's Digest International Book Award for poetry, and is about ready for its third printing

Terry Blackhawk (www.terrymblackhawk.com) is the author of Body & Field, The Dropped Hand, and Escape Artist, which won the John Ciardi Prize, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, on line at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and in journals such as Marlboro Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Florida Review and Borderlands. Reviews of her work can be found in Poet Lore, Booklist, ForeWord and elsewhere. Terry is the founding director of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project (www.insideoutdetroit.org). She lives and writes not far from the river in Detroit, Michigan.

Dorothy Brooks is a retired educator with degrees in art and in music, who took up creative writing two years ago and presently is a writing student at Lansing Community College. In 2009 she won two honorable mentions in the Red Cedar Review competition, a third place in the Michigan Poetry Society annual contest, and was a student editor for the Washington Square Review, which included her poems and creative non-fiction. Dorothy spent almost a decade teaching on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, and while there was part of Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Rural Teachers' program. She is an abstract expressionist painter, and regularly plays her flute for residents in a local nursing home.

Patricia Clark is the author of three books of poems, most recently She Walks Into the Sea (2009 from Michigan State University Press). She also has a chapbook of poetry, Given the Trees, and an anthology of women writers from Prentice Hall which she co-edited with Marilyn Kallet, Words in Her Worlds. She teaches at Grand Valley State University where she is also the university's poet-in-residence. New work is forthcoming in Northwest Review, Zone 3, Upstreet Magazine, and the Ambassador Poetry Project. She'll be giving a reading from her work at the AWP 2010 conference in Denver & will be participating on two panels.

Michael Delp is co-editor of the "Made in Michigan" book series from Wayne State University Press. His collection of short stories AS IF WE WERE PREY (WSU Press) will be out in April of 2010.

John Freeman was born and raised in west Detroit. He received his Bachelor's in Literature from University of Detroit Mercy and his MFA from Bowling Green State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Nimrod, Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review, Commonweal, as well as several other journals. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches in the Department of Writing at Oakland University. His Irish pub band, The Codgers, can be found performing the first Saturday of every month at the Gaelic League in Corktown.

Joy Gaines-Friedler earned her living for over twenty years as a photographer in the Detroit area. Her poetry is widely published and has won numerous awards, including, First Place in the 2006 Litchfield Review contest for a series of poems based on the journal of her friend Jim who died from AIDS. Most recently, she was a semi-finalist in Farmingdale State College’s 2008 Paumanok Poetry Award. Her first book of poetry Like Vapor (Mayapple Press) was published in 2008. Joy teaches poetry and creative writing throughout the Detroit area, including for Springfed Arts Detroit Working Writers, and with young adults “at risk” at Common Ground, a core provider mental health organization in Oakland County. Please visit her website at: www.joygainesfriedler.com.

Mary Jo Firth Gillett's collection of poetry, Soluble Fish, won the '07 Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her three award-winning chapbooks are: Not One (Detroit Writer's Voice), Tiger in a Hairnet (Small Poetry Press, Select Poet's Series), and Chandeliers of Fish (Poetry West). Mary Jo's poems have been published widely in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sycamore Review, Green Mountains Review, and Margie. She's won the N.Y. Open Voice Poetry Award and teaches poetry workshops for Springfed Arts, Metro Detroit Writers.

Seán Henne lives with his wife Carolyn and daughter Katie Rose on forty acres near Fountain, Michigan. He gets his hands muddy both growing garlic and teaching writing to students at West Shore Community College. He delights in both kinds of mud.

Conrad Hilberry taught for many years, first at DePauw University and then at Kalamazoo College, literature and creative writing. I first sent out poems in the late '50's, when there was a lot less competition than there is now. I've published a half dozen collections of poems. Just this year Mayapple Press brought out This Awkward Art, a book that matches up poems of mine with those of our daughter, Jane Hilberry, who teaches at Colorado College.

William Holm is a writer living in Holland, MI. I haven't had a poem published in a long time, so I'm grateful to Driftwood. I recently decided I must resume writing to finally rehab myself as an artist. The result of that decision is my blog (www.billholm.wordpress.com) where I post an original poem every day. "Life Still" is a result of that project. Such a commitment is the only way I can move beyond lazy dabbling and self-recrimination. So one word at a time. Like climbing a dune. I can always take one more step, one more step. I just keep my head down and take one more step.

Jeanette Lee is a senior English major at Kalamazoo College. She enjoys art museums, blowing bubbles and bicycling. Her favorite word is "pillow."

Dawn McDuffie has published poems in The MacGuffin, Rattle, Driftwood, and Connecticut Review. Her chapbook, Carmina Detroit, was published by Adastra Press in 2006. She was the 2008 winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt Prize and teaches Creative Writing in Detroit.

Rosalie Sanara Petrouske's recent publications include a series of journal entries about her daughter, Senara, published in Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal Writing published by Passager Books. She teaches at Lansing Community College in Lansing, Michigan. In 2008, she was a writer in residence in the Porcupine Mountains Artist-in-Residence Program. She finds her inspiration walking along the banks of the Grand River early in the morning or at sundown with her black lab, Hendrix.

Christine Rhein is the author of Wild Flight, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Competition in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review and has been selected for Best New Poets 2007, the Poetry Daily website, and The Writer’s Almanac. A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan with her husband and two sons. Visit her website at www.ChristineRhein.com.

Bob Vance lives in Petoskey Michigan. He has been writing and publishing poetry since 1976. His little books are available through Northern Michigan Artists Market in Petoskey. An avid traveler, but life long resident of Michigan, Bob has been a social worker for about 25 years, eleven as a hospice family counselor. He currently works as an advocate for people recovering from persistent and chronic mental illness and addiction. He also has a growing private practice as a life coach. He believes people have the resources and skills they need to uncover their own way to grow through and beyond life’s quandaries and losses. His job is to guide them, like Virgil, through their own best process to find that way. His specialization areas include: Life Transition due to Health Changes, Family and Primary Relationship/s, Creative Process for Artists, and Alternative Long Term Relationships. Check out his blog for more information: http://sightlinecoach.blogspot.com/

Carol Was is the Poetry Editor for The MacGuffin. Her poetry was nominated by The Gettysburg Review for Best New Poets 2009. It has appeared in The Southern Review, Connecticut Review, Margie, and was read on The Naturalist’s Datebook, a Martha Stewart Sirius Satellite Radio program. She is an active member of Springfed Arts – Metro Detroit Writers.

Jane Wheeler lives with a menagerie of strays and misfits at the end of a dirt road in western Michigan.

Jan Worth-Nelson teaches writing at the UM - Flint. Her novel Night Blind was a top-ten finalist in literary fiction in the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. Her poems, essays, reviews and stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Fourth Genre, Witness, Controlled Burn, PeaceCorpsWriters.org, the Detroit Free Press and many others, and writes a monthly column for Flint's East Village Magazine. She has a reasonably earthy sense of humus.

Janice Zerfas lives in Southwest Michigan where she reads like crazy, writes madly, purviews hundreds of student papers, diligently raises a son, and hopes for a better life always.