Minnesota
for the
NFSPS 2009 Convention
Michael Dennis Browne’s fifth collection of poetry, Selected Poems 1965-1995,
published by Carnegie Mellon University Press,
won the Minnesota Book Award for poetry in 1998. His previous book, You Won’t Remember This, won a Minnesota Book Award
in 1993. He has taught at
Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and former director
of the program in creative writing.
As a librettist, he has written many
texts for music, working with principally
with composers Stephen Paulus and John Foley S. J. His latest collaboration
with Stephen
Paulus, the post-Holocaust oratorio To be Certain of the Dawn, was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music by the Minnesota
Orchestra in 2005
and was recorded by them in 2008.
Browne’s poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies, and
his
awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush
Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the McKnight
Foundation.
Give
Her the River, a picture book with paintings by Wendell Minor, was
published in 2004 by Atheneum Books for Young
Readers.Things I can’t Tell You,
a new collection of poetry, was published in 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University
Press.
Carnegie Mellon will publish What the Poem Wants: Prose on Poetry in
2009.
Browne is married to Lisa McLean and they have
three children: Peter, Mary,
and Nellie.
Mark Doty is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently School of the Arts (Harper Collins, 2005), Source (2002), and Sweet Machine (1998). Other collections include Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary. Doty has received fellowships from Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Provincetown, Mass, and in Houston, TX., where he teaches at the University of Houston. Mark Doty's most recent books include, Fire to Fire: New Selected Poems, and his memoir Dog Years.
Anna George Meek has published in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale
Review, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and many other national journals.
She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poetry Prize, a Minnesota State
Arts Board Fellowship, and most recently , a 2009 National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series (twice),
the Minnesota Book Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her first book -
Acts of Contortion - won the 2002 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Meeks
lives with her husband and daughter in Minneapolis, where she teaches writing,
sings professionally as a member of the Vocal Essence Ensemble Singers, and
works as a freelance violinist .
Connie Wanek lives in Duluth, Minnesota. She was born in Wisconsin in
1952, and lived on a farm outside Green Bay until her family moved to Las
Cruces, New Mexico in 1964. In 1989 she moved with her husband and two children
to Duluth. She was educated at New Mexico State University, and worked in a
family solar heating business for many years. Also, she worked at the Duluth
Public Library and restored a number of old houses. Her books of poems include
Bonfire (1997) and Hartley Field (2002), and she was
co-editor of a prize-winning comprehensive historical anthology of Minnesota
women poets, To Sing Along the Way (2006). Poet Laureate Ted
Kooser named her a 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. Her
third book of poems, On Speaking Terms, is forthcoming in 2009
from Copper Canyon Press.