Vermont Poets and Their Craft
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Neil Shepard is the author of seven books of poetry including Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry, 2015), (T)ravel/Un(t)ravel (Mid-List Press, 2011), This Far from the Source (Mid-List, 2006), I'm Here Because I Lost My Way (Mid-List, 1998), and Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (First Book Award, Mid-List Press, 1993) and the chapbook, Vermont Exit Ramps (Big Table Publishing, 2012), His poems appear in several hundred literary magazines, have been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize, and have been featured online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-A-Day (from the Academy of American Poets). Shepard has been a fellow at the MacDowell Arts Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and he has been a visiting writer at the Chautauqua Writers Institute and The Frost Place. 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 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.
Tamra J. Higgins holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Writing Program, University of Southern Maine and a M.Ed. from Johnson State College. After teaching in the Vermont public schools for 19 years, she founded Sundog Poetry Center, Inc., a nonprofit 501c3 organization that promotes poets and poetry throughout Vermont. Higgins served as President of the Poetry Society of Vermont for three years, from 2012 through 2015. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Passagers, Modern Haiku, Avocet, The Aurorean, The Mountain Troubadour, Vermont Magazine, and other publications. She is the author of Nothing Saved Us: Poems of the Korean War (2014), the chapbook Tenderbellied (2015) and co-editor of Tasteful Traditions: A Collection of Cambridge History, Memories, and Family Recipes. She lives in Jeffersonville, Vermont where, besides writing, reading and promoting poetry, she runs her fiber arts and yarn shop and tends her sheep.