Laura Foley is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, WTF and Night Ringing. Her poem "Gratitude List" won the Common Good Books Poetry Contest and was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. Her poem "Nine Ways of Looking at Light" won the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest. Her book, Joy Street, won the Bisexual Writer's Award, and was praised by David Ferry; and The Glass Tree won ForeWord Magazine's Silver Medal for Book of the Year Award in poetry.
Her work has been published in journals around the world, including New Zealand (Poems in the Waiting Room), China (Shanghai Literary Review), England (Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology and Poetry Society London), Canada (Room Magazine). In the United States her work has been published in several reviews including, the Bellevue Literary Review, Aesthetica Creative Writing, In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief, Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poets, Not My President, an Anthology of Dissent and others.
A New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care-trained chaplain, she provides volunteer palliative care in hospitals and prisons, and is a certified Shri Yoga Instructor. She holds an M.A. and a M. Phil. in English Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife and their two dogs among the hills of Vermont.
April Ossmann is the author of Event Boundaries (Four Way Books, 2017), and Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals and anthologies, including Colorado Review, Harvard Review, and From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009). Her poetry awards include a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, and a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. She has published essays including Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript (Poets & Writers, March/April 2011), and a biography/critical study of poet Lynda Hull in American Writers Supplement XXI (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2011).
Former executive director of Alice James Books (2000 – 2008), she owns a consulting business, offering manuscript editing and publishing advice. She is a faculty editor for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College, and teaches private tutorials and poetry workshops using a method she developed to teach poets to revise their work objectively. She lives in West Windsor, Vermont.
See more about April Ossmann www.aprilossmann.com