Carolina Wren Press is directed by Andrea Selch, Board President and Acting Executive Director, with assistance from part-time staffer Eddie Huffman, as well as input from the Board of Directors and the recently-established Advisory Board. Below are bios for the Board of Directors and the Advisory Board.
Directors
Andrea Selch (President) joined the board in 2001, after the publication of her poetry chapbook, Succory, which was #2 in the Carolina Wren Press poetry chapbook series. She has an MFA from UNC-Greensboro, and a PhD from Duke University, where she taught creative writing from 1999 until 2003. Her poems have been published in Calyx, Equinox, The Greensboro Review, Oyster Boy Review, Luna, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner and featured on the Best American Poetry blog. Her full-length collection of poetry, Startling, was published by Turning Point Press in October, 2004, and reissued by Cockeyed Press in 2009. In 2007, Choreo Collective danced her poems “Holy Shell Waiting for the Return of the Soul,” and “Early Weaning” at the biennial symposium of Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for the Study of Women’s History and Culture. She won a 2008 “Hippo” Award from The Monti for her spoken story, “Replacement Child.” Her newest collection, Boy Returning Water to the Sea: Koans for Kelly Fearing, was published by Cockeyed Press in 2009.
Tanya Olson (Vice-President and Treasurer) holds the M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College, Dublin and a Ph.D. from UNC-Greensboro with a specialization in 20th-Century British Literature. She currently teaches English at Vance-Granville Community College. In addition to her work with CWP, she coordinates Third Fridays in Durham, NC. She is a poet and essayist who has published work in the Urban Hiker, Cairn, Simple Vows, Bad Subjects, and Main Street Rag. In 2002, she was the recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council. In 2008, she was the winner of a “Hippo” Award from The Monti for her spoken story, “Lemon Pig.” In 2010, she won the “Discovery” / Boston Review Award from the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
Judy Dearlove (Board Member) holds a BA in English Literature from Indiana University and an MA and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia. She has taught writing and literature for more than three decades, including positions as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Wooster (Ohio) and as a tenured member of the English department at Duke University. She left her tenured position at Duke to pursue a writing career in the computer industry where she was involved in technical writing, market intelligence, management, and corporate communications. In 1997, she left IBM to become Director of the Learning Center at Meredith College. In 2007, she retired from Meredith in order to devote more time to her writing. Her publications include a book entitled Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art, approximately two dozen works of literary criticism (articles, reviews, and papers), and an assortment of corporate publications such as newsletters, market intelligence reports, technical documents, two web pages, and a memoir which she promises never to publish. Currently, she lives in Durham where she is writing fiction.
Patrick Herron (Board Member) is a poet, artist and information scientist from Chapel Hill, NC, USA. His doll Lester is the author of Be Somebody (2008, Effing Press), about which Pulitzer-winner Ron Silliman wrote, “Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are.” Patrick is the author of several books of poetry including The American Godwar Complex (2004, BlazeVox) as well as a recent book on the relationship between text mining and scientific discovery in medicine (2008, Verlag Dr. Mueller). He is now working on a new volume of poetry tentatively entitled Embedded. Patrick’s work has appeared in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and his proximate.org was the first new media poetics site added to the permanent collection of the New Museum for Contemporary Art. You may find some of Patrick’s poems and essays in print and online journals such as The Exquisite Corpse, Jacket, Fulcrum, Fanzine, A Chide’s Alphabet, and Talisman. He is the founder of the Carrboro International Poetry Festival, winner of the 2005 Triangle Arts Award from The Independent (Durham NC), and a former Carrboro Poet Laureate. Patrick teaches new media studies, develops serious games (http://virtualpeace.org), and studies global innovation networks for the Jenkins Chair at Duke University. (http://patrickherron.com)
David Kellogg (Board Member) was President of Carolina Wren Press from 1998 until 2004. He started at the Press in 1995 by editing two volumes of poetry by Jaki Shelton Green, and later founded and was the series editor for the Carolina Wren Press Chapbook Series. From 1990 to 1992, he was editor of the Carolina Quarterly, a literary journal. A recipient of an Emerging Artists’ Award from the Durham Arts Council, David has published poems in numerous journals, including most recently Chain, Samizdat, and Combo. A member of the faculty of Coastal Carolina University, he nonetheless continues to be an active part of the Press via the internet.
Susan Kirby-Smith (Board Member and Associate Director) is a graduate of Oberlin College who holds an M.A. in English from UNC-Greensboro. She served on the staff of The Southern Review and Cave Wall for two years and currently assists at LSU Press. In May of 2010, she will earn her M.F.A. from Louisiana State University, where she studied with James Wilcox, Andrei Codrescu, Femi Euba and Rodger Kamenetz. She is working on a novel, several plays and a collection of poems. She edits an online journal called Unmoveable Feast.
Jennifer Snead (Board Member) is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where she teaches and writes on eighteenth-century literature, contemporary poetry, and the history of the book. She has also taught creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Pennsylvania for several years, where she was Director of the Kelly Writers House.
Shana Tucker (Board Member) is a “ChamberSoul” cellist and singer-songwriter from New York. Her first album, SHiNE, is a showcase for her sultry pastiche of jazz infused with smooth undertones of acoustic pop and contemporary folk. A frequent visitor to the Triangle, she lives in Las Vegas where she sings and plays cello in Cirque de Soleil’s show Ka.
Advisory Board
William Pitt Root‘s poems, praised in the New York Times as “marvelous, rangy, virile, startling for their sophistication, pungency and force,” have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, APR, Harpers, Poetry and many collections. While working variously in shipyards, factories, mines he has been translated into 20 languages, received major grants from Guggenheim, Rockefeller, the National Endowment of the Arts, the US/UK Exchange Artist program, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Root has also taught widely, including at Hunter College, University of Montana, Michigan State University, and he has served as poet-in-residence at Amherst, NYU, Interlochen, Univ. of SW Louisiana, and as Distinguished poet-in-residence at Wichita SU and Pacific Lutheran University. After the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, of Root’s poem The Unbroken Diamond: Nightletter to the Mujahedeen, Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky wrote “Your lines may not much help those poor people, but they surely redeem this nation.” From 1997-2002 Root was Tucson’s first poet laureate. He travels widely to read, workshop, take photographs; and he loves coming home. He is poetry editor of CUTTHROAT, A Journal of the Arts. White Boots: New & Selected Poems of the West (Carolina Wren Press) is his most recent collection. Welcome, Traveler: Selected Early Odes of Pablo Neruda is forthcoming in 2011.
Evie Shockley is the author of two books of poetry, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her poems also appear and are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Talisman, Sous Rature, esque, MELUS, Iron Horse Review, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hambone, Callaloo, No Tell Motel, Harvard Review, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, Achiote Seeds, Tuesday; An Art Project, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the African Diaspora, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. She currently co-edits jubilat; in 2007, she guest-edited a special issue of MiPOesias (called “~QUEST~”) that features contemporary African American poets. Shockley also serves as a contributing editor to Evening Will Come, a monthly journal of poetics. Shockley is also a literary scholar and critic. Her critical book, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U of Iowa P, forthcoming) has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She has critical reviews and literary essays published or forthcoming in such journals and anthologies as Callaloo, Indiana Review, Talisman, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Mixed Blood, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, and A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line. She currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey and teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Pamela Uschuk Called by The Bloomsbury Review, “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is the author of five books of poems, the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, One Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks, Without the Comfort of Stars: New and Selected Poems (2007 Sampark Press, New Delhi and London), and, her latest, Crazy Love (Wings Press), winner of a 2010 American Book Award. She is also the author of several chapbooks of poems, including Pam Uschuk’s Greatest Hits (2009, Pudding House Press). Uschuk’s work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Albanian, and Korean. Her work has appeared in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni, Ploughshares, and Pequod. Among Uschuk’s literary prizes are the 2010 New Millennium Poetry Prize, 2010 Best of the Web, the Struga Poetry Prize (for a single poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation and Amnesty International. Nearly 30 individual poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Pamela Uschuk is a Professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature. She is also Director of the Southwest Writers Institute at FLC. Editor-In-Chief of the literary magazine, CUTTHROAT, A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado. During spring semester 2011, Uschuk holds the Hodges Chair as Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
