You are hereJulie Read Moeller Poetry Track
Julie Read Moeller Poetry Track
In its fourth year, our poetry workshops continue to be a boon, enriching the writing of beginning and committed poets alike. Sussing out meaning, pushing imagery to communicate effectively, discussing form and meter, and fine tuning our work — line by line — are all a part of the poetic dialogue.
Faculty:
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.
Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East, Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).
Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, "her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."
Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin.
Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.
She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.
David Romtvedt
David Romtvedt was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He returned to the Pacific Northwest to attend Reed College, graduating in 1972 with a BA in American Studies. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, book store clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, college professor, blueberry picker, musician, and ranch hand.
His most recent book of poetry is Some Church, published by Milkweed Editions in fall 2005. He is also the author of Windmill: Essays from Four Mile Ranch, two books of fiction, Crossing Wyoming and Free and Compulsory for All, and several books of poetry, including Certainty, How Many Horses, Moon, and the National Poetry Series selection, A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know. He has edited two anthologies, Deep West and Wyoming Fence Lines. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award, Romtvedt served from 2003 to 2011 as the poet laureate of Wyoming.
With the Fireants, Romtvedt performs creole dance music of the Americas and has released three recordings, It’s Hot (About Three Weeks a Year), Bury my Clothes, and Ants on Ice. The Fireants have performed throughout the Rocky Mountain states as well as at the Encuentro de Dos Tradiciones in Mexico City and Ciudad Altamirano, Mexico.
Romtvedt has served as manager of the Centrum Foundation’s International Folk Dance and Music Festival and Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. He has been a staff musician at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and at the Sierra Swing Festival. He recently completed a series of radio programs on traditional musics of the American Southwest for Wyoming and Montana National Public Radio.
Martin Rock
Martin Rock is a poet, editor, and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. His poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Forklift Ohio, La Petite Zine, The Tampa Review, Salamander, and others. With Phillip D. Ischy he wrote the collaborative chapbook, Fish, You Bird (Pilot Books), and his full length manuscript New Country was a recent finalist for Sarabande's Kathryn E. Morton prize for poetry. He is the designer and head editor of Loaded Bicycle, an online literary magazine of poetry, translation, and art, and he is Managing Editor of Epiphany, a literary journal. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was awarded a two-year fellowship and was Editor in Chief of Washington Square. Having lived for three and a half years in Japan, Martin is translating a book of Japanese poet Masato Tomobe's work into English. He teaches literature and writing at Berkeley College in Manhattan.
Bethany Schultz Hurst
Bethany Schultz Hurst's poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Cimarron Review, Gettysburg Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Rattle. She teaches writing at Idaho State University, where she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008.
