ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maureen Tolman Flannery has grounded her poetics in the various landscapes of her life; Wyoming, where she grew up the daughter of a rancher, Mexico, where she has become infatuated with the rich complexity of Mexican culture and geography, and Chicago, where she has settled to raise her family of three sons and a daughter. These offspring, along with her husband of thirty-five years, provide much grist for her poetical mill. She received a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and has been twice nominated from a Pushcart Prize. She is a two-time grand prize winner of Sparrowgrass’ Award of Poetic Excellence, and has won first place in the WyoPoets contest, the Telluride Magazine poetry contest, and the New River Poets contest. Her two volumes of poetry are Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico, (John Gordon Burke, 2004) and Remembered into Life, (New Song Press, 2001). She edited the critically acclaimed Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, an anthology of travel poetry (John Gordon Burke, 2003). Her chapbook, Conversations for the Road, is available online at tmpoetry.com. Her poems have appeared in hundred reviews, magazines, and journals, and she has placed poems in forty anthologies. Her work has been selected for “Dial-A-Poem, Chicago,” and has been heard on WBEZ’s “Metropolis.” She is also secretary/treasurer of Poet’s Club of Chicago. Flannery received her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from Creighton University, and has taught English as a Foreign Language for thirty years.

Helen Degen Cohen is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Indiana Writers' Conference Award in Poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine's International Short Story Competition, three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for fiction and poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Her work is the subject of scholarly essays, including: "Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen", by Miriam Dean-Notting (Kenyon College), in Shofar (University of Nebraska Press) and "This Dark Poland – Ethnicity in the work of Helen Degen Cohen", by John Guzlowski, in Something of My Very Own To Say: American Woman Writers of Polish Descent (Columbia University Press). She has received fellowships to majors arts colonies in the U.S., including Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center For Creative Arts, and Ragdale. She was the featured poet twice in the Spoon River Poetry Review.

The author has two bodies of work, one about the war and the other about everything else. Seven sections of her autobiographical novel, The Edge of the Field, have been published to date, the latest in 2009 in "Where We Find Ourselves", an anthology by SUNY. One section received first prize in Stand Magazine's International Competition (England), and another received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. The chapbook "On A Good Day One Discovers Another Poet" (2009), falls into the everything else category, and is part of a large collection entitled The Book of (night) Writing. Ms Cohen publishes widely in literary journals such as The Partisan Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Cream City, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Versal (Holland), Stand Magazine (England), The Antigonish Review (Canda), Akcent (Poland), and Nimrod (forthcoming in 2009). She is working on a backlog of manuscripts, including much poetry, short and long fiction, essays, and work for theater and children.

Helen Degen Cohen has traveled statewide as an Artist-In-Education through the Illinois Arts Council, and taught at Roosevelt University. She is a founding and current editor of the poetry journal, Rhino, and coordinates its popular adjunct workshop, The Poetry Forum. Her many loves include painting, the rumba, movies, gardening, the jitterbug, designing book covers, folk dancing, walking in the woods, the New York City Ballet, raspberries, and habry, the blue cornflowers that grew along the edges of wheat fields.