Thursday, September 30 -- Mary Jo Firth Gillett and Phillip Sterling

Mary Jo Firth Gillett's poetry collection, Soluble Fish, won the Crab Orchard Series First Book award.  Gillett's poems have been published widely in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sycamore Review, Green Mountain Review, and Margie. She won the N.Y. Open Voice Poetry Award and teaches advanced poetry workshops for Springfed Arts/Metro Detroit Writers. 

Phillip Sterling's most recent poetry collection is Abeyance, winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007.   He is the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003) and founding coordinator of the Literature In Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught for many years. A short fiction collection is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Friday, October 1 -- Josie Kearns and Keith Taylor

Josie Kearns had two books published in 2009, the poetry collection The Theory of Everything (Mayapple Press) and poetry chapbook Alphabet of the Ocean (March Street Press). Kearns has won numerous awards for her work, which has also appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Moving Out, The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, and Poetry Northwest, and other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Poet and writer Keith Taylor coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan and formerly managed Shaman Drum, a leading independent bookstore. He has published eleven volumes: collections of poetry and short fiction, edited volumes, and translations. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, Taylor's most recent book, If The World Becomes So Bright, was published in 2009 by Wayne State University Press.

Saturday, October 2 -- Judith Minty and Conrad Hilberry

Judith Minty's first book, Lake Songs and Other Fears, received the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1973. Since then she has published four other full-length collections of poetry including: Yellow Dog Journal, In The Presence Of Mothers, Dancing The Fault; and Walking with the Bear, and three chapbooks including: Letters To My Daughters, Counting The Losses and The Mad Painter Poems. Minty's poetry, essays and short stories have been published in numerous magazines and in over fifty anthologies. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Villa Montalvo Award for Excellence in Poetry and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry magazine. 

Conrad Hilberry, who is retired from the faculty of Kalamazoo

College, has published five books of poems and four chapbooks. The most recent of these are Player Piano, Taking Notes on Nature's Wild Inventions, and Sorting Smoke: New and Selected Poems, which was the winner of the Iowa Prize. He has also been one of the editors of the three "Third Coast" anthologies of Michigan Poetry published by Wayne State University Press in 1976, 1988 and 2000. Luke Karamozov, a psychological case study, was published by Wayne State in 1987. That same year, Beggar Moon, a musical written with Merwin Lewis, was performed at the Kalamazoo Festival Playhouse.