James Haug's newest collection of poems, Legend of the Recent Past, was published by the National Poetry Review Press. His previous collections are Walking Liberty (Winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, Northeastern University Press) and The Stolen Car (University of Massachusetts Press). His chapbooks include Fox Luck, which won the Center for Book Arts chapbook competition, A Plan of How to Catch Amanda from Factory Hollow Press and Scratch from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He has launched a new independent press Scram that will publish chapbooks and full length titles. His newest word & picture books are MASSACHUSETTS and MYRA. His poems have appeared in such journals as American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Field, and Ploughshares. He frequently teaches workshops for the MFA for Poets and Writers University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The daughter of radio station owner-operators, poet and editor Gillian Conoley was born in Austin. She was raised in Austin’s rural outskirts, where “the only art around was film,” Conoley recalled during a 2010 conversation with Sara Mumulo for The Offending Adam. This early exposure to film would influence her writing: “Film was my first experience of art. As a writer, I envy film’s ability to immediately draw us in to a world that looks so much like the one we walk in.”
Her new books are PEACE just out from Omnidawn, and THE PLOT GENIE, also from Omnidawn; and just out this fall, a translation of 3 Henri Michaux books, out from City Lights, THOUSAND TIMES BROKEN.
She is the founding editor the acclaimed literary journal VOLT, and professor and poet in residence at Sonoma State University.
Conoley’s poetry engages the act of narrative sourcing with a dimensional, layered approach to the relationship between the poetic line and the page. Praising Conoley’s “out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye, down-a-sidestreet poetry of glimpsed coincidence” in a 1996 review of Beckon (1996) for the Boston Review, A.V. Christie notes, “Through imitation and the lushest, surreal collisions she often breaks into a world.” Conoley’s collections include Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award–winner Some Gangster Pain, National Book Critics Circle Award–finalist Tall Stranger. Her work is featured in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009, edited by Cole Swenson and David St. John), Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (2008, edited by Reginald Shepherd), and Best American Poetry (1997, edited by James Tate).
Conoley earned a BA in journalism at Southern Methodist State University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Vermont College. Her honors include American Poetry Review’s Jerome J. Shestack Prize, several Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. Conoley lives with her husband, novelist Domenic Stansberry, in the San Francisco Bay area.