Our Advisory Board
Patsy Anne Bickerstaff is currently President of the Poetry Society of Virginia and a member of the Board of Governors of the Virginia Writers Club. She also served terms as President of the Virginia Writers Club, and President of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Bickerstaff's publications include Mrs. Noah’s Journal (2007), City Rain (1989), and Chained to a Post (1994). Her works have been included in more than 100 publications, included The Lyric, Caprice, The Cape Rock, In the West of Ireland, The Caribbean Writer, Ariel, The Poet's Domain, Roanoke Review, and Potomac Review. Patsy Anne has been awarded First place for the Robert Penn Warren Award; a number of awards from the Virginia Highlands Festival; the Wytheville Chautauqua; the Virginia Writers' Guild; and the Poetry Society of Virginia. She has also been a member of poetry societies in Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, and California. Bickerstaff is listed in International Who's Who of Poetry, Poets and Writers; and served as the President of the Virginia Writer's Club in 1999.
John Bowers -- Biographer, Editor, Fiction Writer. John Bowers has published seven books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent books are two nonfiction books on the Civil War: Stonewall Jackson: Portrait Of A Soldier And Chickamauga/Chattanooga: The Battles That Doomed The Confederacy. He has published over 200 articles, essays, and stories in such magazines as Playboy, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Village Voice, New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Cosmopolitan. His Play The Remembrance Of Things Present appeared Off-Broadway twice. Currently, he is an associate professor at Columbia University where he teaches writing.
Philip Brady is a founding editor of the Etruscan Press; a poet (Fathom, a most recent book); an essayist, (By Heart: Reflections of a Rust-Belt Bard): a writer of memoirs (To Prove my Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife and Weal, a1999 winner of the Snyder Prize. His first book, Forged Correspondences (New Myths), was chosen for Ploughshares Editors' Shelf by Maxine Kumin. He also co-edited, with James F. Carens, Critical Essays on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Twayne Publishers). Brady has won five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Awards, a Thayer Fellowship from New York State, and residencies in America, Ireland, Spain, Scotland, and the Czech Republic. Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork in Ireland, and on the faculty of Semester at Sea. Currently, he is a professor of English at Youngstown State University. He directs the YSU Poetry Center and plays in the New-Celtic band, Brady's Leap.
Christopher Busa --Poet, Editor, Essayist. Chris Busa is Founding Editor of Providence Arts Press, a publisher of the PROVINCETOWN ARTS, as well as monographs on distinguished older artists and first books of poetry by new poets. Books, stories, essays, and poems published under Christopher Busa’s editorship have garnered multiple national and state arts awards. He has taped several hundred interviews with over 1,000 artists and writers in preparation for a comprehensive work about the century-long history of Provincetown as an art colony. His interviews and profiles of artists and writers have appeared in such magazines as ARTS, GARDEN DESIGN, PARIS REVIEW, and the PARTISAN REVIEW. His is also the author of THE PROVINCETOWN ARTISTS' COOKBOOK, which tells the tale of artists creating a contemporary portrait of the town as an art colony (Abington, 1988). As an editor, he introduced the THE EROTIC WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE (Crown, 1989) and TRIPPING: A MEMOIR by B. H. Friedman, which was published in June 2006 by Provincetown Arts Press.
Claudia Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington and a contributing editor of the literary magazine Shenandoah. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals. Her books of poems, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997) and Pinion, An Elegy (2002) were published as part of Louisiana State University Press's signature series, Southern Messenger Poets. Emerson has been awarded individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts
Bill Glose is an award-winning writer whose work has been published internationally; England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. His honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award and the Virginia Press Association 1st Place Award for Sports News Writing. Glose has been a featured speaker on literary craft at many events and served as a judge in various writing contests. For three years Glose served as the editor of Virginia Adversaria. He is also columnist for Virginia Living and a regular contributor to several other magazines. Hundreds of his articles have appeared in numerous publications, and his short fiction and poetry have been published in Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Endicott Review, and other journals.
Lenore Hart – Novelist, Essayist, Memoirist, Poet. Lenore Hart is the author of The Treasure Of Savage Island, Ordinary Springs, Waterwoman, Black River, T. Rex At Swan Lake (Dutton), Sort Elv (Fredhois Forlag, Oslo), Becky (St. Martins Press, 2008) and numerous other works of fiction. Lenore Hart holds a BA from the University of Central Florida, an MLS from Florida State, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. She has been a grant recipient and writer in residence for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Fine Arts Council and a Visiting Writer at Flagler College in St. Augustine. She has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and featured on Voice of America, in Poets and Writers, and on the PBS series Writer to Writer. She is also a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Sweetbriar College, and at present is the writer in residence at The New College of Florida in Sarasota.
J. Michael Lennon is the official biographer of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer. He is a former professor of English at Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield, Illinois, and Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. While at Wilkes he held various offices, including Vice President of the university and chairman of the Humanities Division, as well as co-director of the Wilkes University low-residency MA/MFA in Creative Writing, a program which he founded in 2004, along with current Program Director Bonnie Culver. He is also the current President and one of the founders of The Norman Mailer Society, a literary society dedicated to promoting interest and scholarship on the works of Norman Mailer. He has published and edited many books and articles, and is currently based in Massachusetts
Tony Morris was born in North Carolina, and spent his childhood years in the Appalachia mountains of North Georgia and Eastern Kentucky. Morris's first book of poems, Fugue's End won the 2004 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award, and was published by Birch Brook Press in September, 2004. His most recent book, Back to Cain, was published by The Olive Press in October, 2005. Morris's poems have been awarded the Louisiana Literature Poetry Prize, and the Tennessee Writers Alliance Poetry Award, and have been published in over fifty national journals, including: Spoon River Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, Meridian, The Sewanee Theological Review, South Dakota Review, Potomac Review, and many others. He is the Managing Editor of Southern Poetry Review.
Robert Mooney is a founding editor of the Etruscan Press and has served as the editor of New Myths Press and the acclaimed literary journal New Myths/MSS, which was founded by John Gardner. A Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College, he directs the O'Neill Literary House. His most significant recent publication is the novel, Father of the Man (Pantheon). He has published numerous short stories, including "Halloween" in the Paterson Literary Review (1994), which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
David Poyer –Novelist, Creative Nonfiction. David Poyer graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1971. Poyer's active and reserve naval service included sea duty in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, and Pacific, and shore duty at the Pentagon, Surface Warfare Development Group, Joint Forces Command, and in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Poyer began writing in 1976, and is the author of twenty-eight books to date, including The Only Thing To Fear, Fire On The Waters, The Med, The Gulf, The Circle, The Passage, Tomahawk, China Sea, And Black Storm; best-selling Navy novels The Dead Of Winter, Winter In The Heart, As The Wolf Loves Winter, And Thunder On The Mountain, Set In The Pennsylvania Hills; And Hatteras Blue, Bahamas Blue, and Down To A Sunless Sea, an underwater diving adventure. His work has been published in Britain, translated into Japanese, Dutch, and Italian, recorded for audiobooks, eBooks, iPod downloads, and selected by the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club. Rights to several properties have been sold or optioned for films. His most recent work is The Command (St. Martin's Press), and That Anvil Of Our Souls, a novel of Monitor and Merrimack, to come out this July. Poyer is a USA Today best-selling author, and has taught or lectured at Annapolis, Flagler College, University of Pittsburgh, and several other colleges. He has been a guest on PBS's "Writer to Writer" series and on Voice of America, and has also appeared at the Southern Festival of Book Arts.
Ann Shalaski was born in Connecticut and lives in Newport News, Virginia. A member of The National League of American Pen Women and the Poetry Society of Virginia, she is president of the advisory council for Christopher Newport University’s Writers’ Conference and Writing Contest. She is a workshop presenter and hosts monthly open mic poetry events. An award-winning poet and a short story writer, her story of a family’s disconnect and rivalry appears in Keeper of the Stories, A Guide to Writing Family Stories. Ms. Shalaski’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Main Channel Voices, Port Folio Weekly, ByLine, and numerous other publications.