Faculty for Conference on Poetry and Teaching 2012

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of twelve books, including The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems, and a work of fiction entitled The Poetry Life: Ten Stories. In March 2011 his eighth book of poetry, Impenitent Notes, was published by CavanKerry Press. He is a former poet laureate of Maine who teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005 and holds an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. He works widely in schools with students and teachers.

Dawn Potter is the author of two collections of poetry as well as a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, which won the 2010 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. Dawn is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and works frequently as a visiting writer in the schools. She lives in Harmony, Maine.

Poet, storyteller, and teaching artist Luray Gross works extensively in schools and the community presenting workshops and performances for all ages. She is a believer in the power of poems and stories as resources for the nurture of heart, mind, and spirit. She is a rostered teaching artist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Storytelling Arts, Inc. With these organizations and on a freelance basis, she has presented workshops and performances for students K - 12, teachers, and the general public since 1989. Her own love of the spoken and written word, the outdoors, and music were nurtured by her experiences growing up on a busy dairy farm in Pennsylvania. Luray is the author of three collections of poetry: Forenoon, Elegant Reprieve which won the 1995-96 Still Waters Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and The Perfection of Zeros.

Angela Patten is author of two poetry collections, Reliquaries and Still Listening, both published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Her poems have appeared in anthologies that include Cudovista Usta (Marvellous Mouth), Drustvo Apokalipsa (Slovenia); The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets; and The Breath of Parted Lips II. Her work has also been published in literary journals such as Poetry Ireland, Calyx Journal, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review. Angela has been awarded grants for poetry from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Arts Endowment. A native of Dublin, Ireland, she now lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband, poet Daniel Lusk. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Vermont.