Barbara Crooker and Marjorie Maddox

Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and author of nine full-length books and twelve chapbooks of poetry. Her ninth book, Some Glad Morning, is forthcoming in The Pitt Poetry Series in 2019. Her awards include the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The Chariton Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Poetry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Hollins Critic, Poetry International, The Denver Quarterly, Smartish Pace, Gargoyle, Christianity and Literature, Poetry East, The American Poetry Journal, Dogwood, Zone 3, Passages North, Nimrod, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her work has been read on The Writer’s Almanac and featured on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and she is the mother of a 34-year-old son with autism. Marjorie Maddox, professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University and assistant editor of Presence, has published eleven collections of poetry, including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize, re-release 2018), True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series, Illumination Book Award Medalist), Local News from Someplace Else, Wives' Tales, Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award), the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press), four children’s books, including A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (Boyds Mills Press), co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Press), and over 550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. She is Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell (MFA) and the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to the Major Leagues. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com.