What does it mean to be an American in 2017? What has it ever meant? Join us as these five poets interrogate and celebrate America—our past, present, and future; our successes and heartbreaking failures; our color; our queerness; our desperation; and our hopes.
My America
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021) and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His first chapbook, Black Sand, is recently out from Foundlings Press. He is a 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar.
Ruth Goring’s poetry collections are Soap Is Political (Glass Lyre, 2015) and Yellow Doors (WordFarm, 2003); her children’s picture book Adriana's Angels / Los ángeles de Adriana is due out in 2017. Ruth’s poems have appeared in CALYX, Pilgrimage, RHINO, New Madrid, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She edits books at the University of Chicago Press and teaches an editing course at the Graham School.
Martha Kaplan is a Pushcart nominated poet living in Madison. She has published widely, most recently in Hospital Drive Anthology, An Ariel Anthology, and in Driftless: A Zoomorphic Anthology. She won the 2016 Poets' Choice Contest from Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She has been politically active both in Texas and Wisconsin.
Richard Merelman, a native of Washington, D. C., is Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The Imaginary Baritone (Fireweed Press), his first book of poems appeared in 2012. In 2016, Finishing Line Press published his chapbook The Unnamed Continent. In 2017, Bent Paddle Press published his Sensorium, another chapbook. He has published individual poems in journals, such as Main Street Rag, Lake Effect, Stonbeboat, and Measure. He and his wife, Sally Hutchison, live in Madison, WI.
Margaret Rozga, 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, initiated the project that grew into this anthology in workshops throughout Wisconsin and served as co-editor in bringing Through This Door to publication. Her fifth book of poems, Holding My Selves Together, is scheduled for publication in May 2021 by Cornerstone Press.
Shoshauna Shy is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent titled What the Postcard Didn’t Say which won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. A twice-nominated Pushcart Prize nominee, Shoshauna works for the Wisconsin Humanities Council and helped create, coordinate and facilitate poetry programs for the annual Wisconsin Book Festival in downtown Madison for a decade. She is also the founder of Woodrow Hall Editions which sponsors the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf initiative, and the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Award program.
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