2010 Retreat Summary Page

JoAnn Balingit is author of Your Heart and How it Works (Spire Press, 2009) and is Delaware’s current poet laureate, appointed in 2008. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harpur Palate, Smartish Pace, Best New Poets 2007, DIAGRAM.2, on Verse Daily and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and was a 2009 MAAF creative fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. JoAnn lived abroad for several years in Morocco and Portugal, countries where two of her four children were born. From 1990-2000 she was a librarian and technology advocate in the public schools. She holds masters degrees in literature from UC Irvine and in library science from Indiana University. She earned a doctorate in Education from the University of Delaware in 2008.

Frank Giampietro’s first book of poems Begin Anywhere was published by Alice James Books in 2008. He is the editor and designer of the online poetry journal, La Fovea (www.lafovea.org) and Poems by Heart (www.poemsbyheart.org). His poetry, short short fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals including 32 Poems, American Book Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, CutBank, FENCE, Hayden’s Ferry, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Subtropics, and Rain Taxi. Awards for his writing include a Florida Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born and reared in Dover, Delaware, Giampietro currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida with his wife and two young children and is finishing his Ph.D. in English at Florida State University. For more about Frank Giampietro visit www.frankgiampietro.com

Tama Baldwin was born in Camden, New Jersey, home of the Garden State’s “good gray poet,” whose Leaves of Grass remains a fire for her. She has lived in many parts of the United States, rooting more recently in the Midwest after graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and Ohio University. She taught creative writing and literature at Western Illinois University for quite a few years before departing academia entirely in 2009. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Gulf Coast, Queens Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Fiction International, and Tarpaulin Sky. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Ms, Poetry, and The Georgia Review, and a chapbook of some of that work, Garden, appeared in 2006. She has received grants from the Illinois Council of the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.