Neil Shepard (born January 29, 1951, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts) is an American poet, essayist, professor of creative writing, and literary magazine editor. He has a BA from University of Vermont, MFA from Colorado State University, and Ph.D. from Ohio University. He has taught at Louisiana State University, Rider University (NJ), and Johnson State College (VT). He has published a chapbook of poems, Vermont Exit Ramps (Big Table Publishing, 2012), as well as five full collections of poetry—Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (First Book Award, Mid-List Press, 1993); I'm Here Because I Lost My Way (Mid-List, 1998); This Far from the Source(Mid-List, 2006); (T)ravel/Un(t)ravel (Mid-List, 2011); and most recently, Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry Press, 2015). His poems and essays appear in several hundred magazines, among themAntioch Review, AWP Chronicle, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, New England Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Shenandoah, Small Press Reviews, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. His poems have been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize, and they have been featured online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, andPoem-A-Day (from the Academy of American Poets). Shepard has been a fellow at the MacDowell Arts Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Centre d'Art Marnay (France), and Tyrone Guthrie Arts Center (Ireland); and he has been a visiting writer at the Chautauqua Writers Institute, The Frost Place, and the Ossabaw Island Writers Retreat. He founded and directed for eight years the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center, and he taught for several decades in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Johnson State College in Vermont until his retirement in 2009. He also founded the literary magazine Green Mountains Review and was the Senior Editor for a quarter-century. He currently splits his time between Vermont and New York City, where he teaches poetry workshops at The Poets House and is a core faculty in the low-residency MFA writing program at Wilkes University (PA). Outside of the literary realm, Neil is a founding member of the jazz-poetry group POJAZZ. His latest book is Vermont Exit Ramps II.
Stephen Cramer's first book of poems, Shiva's Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press. From the Hip, which follows the history of hip hop in a series of 56 sonnets, came out in 2014 from Wind Ridge Press. His work has appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, African American Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. An Assistant Poetry Editor at Green Mountains Review, he teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont and lives with his wife and daughter in Burlington, Vermont. His latest book is Bone Music.
Karin Gottshall is a poet and fiction writer who teaches poetry writing at Middlebury College. She also directs the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf.She received a BA with an emphasis in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her new book, The River Won’t Hold You, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize, and is now available. Her first book, Crocus, won the Poets Out Loud Prize in 2007 and was published by Fordham University Press. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks: Flood Letters, Almanac for the Sleepless, and Swan. Some of her recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.