Faculty for the Festival and Conference on Poetry 2012

Martha Rhodes, director and faculty member of The Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry, is the author of four collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), Mother Quiet, and The Beds . Her poems have been published widely in such journals as Agni, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. She has also been anthologized widely, her work appearing in Agni 30 Years, Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, Poem in Your Pocket (a publication of the Academy of American Poets), and It's Not You, It's Me. Rhodes has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California at Irvine. She is a member of the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A former member of the board of trustees of The Frost Place, she now serves on its advisory board. She has directed the Festival and Conference on Poetry since 2010. Martha Rhodes is the director of Four Way Books in NYC.

Chris Bursk, recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships, is the author of ten books, most recently The Improbable Swervings of Atoms from University of Pittsburgh Press (winner of Donald Hall Prize in Poetry from AWP and the Milton Kessler Prize), The First Inhabitants of Arcadia from the University of Arkansas Press (and winner of the Patterson Prize) and The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns. In addition to working as a volunteer for three decades in the corrections system, he teaches at Bucks County Community College. His poems have earned the Another Chicago Magazine Award, the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review, the New Letters Prize in Poetry and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Most importantly he is the grandfather of six.

Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin. Her second collection, The Glimmering Room, will be published in fall of 2012 by Four Way Books. Her third collection of poems is forthcoming in 2014 from Four Way Books. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and others. She has been the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Vievee Francis is the author of two poetry collections Blue-Tail Fly (2006) and Horse in the Dark (forthcoming 2012, Winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize). Her work is also forthcoming or has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo,Crab Orchard Review, Sou'wester, Indiana Review, Best American Poetry 2010, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, among others. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan where she was the 2009/2010 Poet in Residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholar's Program. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently an associate editor for Callaloo and visiting artist/poet at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You're the Enemy, which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in New England Review,American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and Bloom. A winner of 2011 Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, he teaches creative writing at the State University of New York—Potsdam.

Daniel Tobin is the author of five books of poems— Where the World is Made ,Double Life,The Narrows, Second Things , and most recently Belated Heavens . His sixth book of poems, The Net , is due out in 2014. Among his awards are the 'Discovery'/The Nation Award, The Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, The Massachusetts Book Award, as well as fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, Tobin has written numerous essays on poetry as well as two critical books, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Awake in America . He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present, Light in Hand: The Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, and (with Pimone Triplett) Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art. Widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, his work appears widely in anthologies, including The Norton Introduction to Poetry. He is presently interim dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College.

The 2012 Poetry Fellow
Stephen Motika is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007) and In the Madrones (2011). His first book, Western Practice, will be published by Alice James Books in April 2012. Recent work has appeared in At Length, The Brooklyn Review , Eleven Eleven , The Boog City Reader 4, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. A 2010-2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is the program director at Poets House and the publisher of Nightboat Books.