Robert Fanning

The Seed Thieves

In addition to The Seed Thieves, Robert Fanning is the author of Old Bright Wheel, winner of the Ledge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, his writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award. His work has also been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, America, The Ledge, and Artword Quarterly. He is the Program Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which brings professional writers into the classrooms of the Detroit Public Schools. He is a resident of Ferndale.

“Passionate and accomplished — this poet’s ear is beautifully tuned — The Seed Thieves is an urgent, nervous, tender, and brilliant first book. Read it for joy!”
—Tomas Lux, author of The Street of Clocks and The Cradle Place

“Turning away from this morning’s headlines to Robert Fannings’ book I feel that someone has steadied my shoulders, and for a while I walk in the holy light of sanity — through charred buildings, yes, in and out of broken-hearted familes and urban traffic, the awful billboards and births and deaths, "the intricate architecture of rubble" that is our lived lives. But the voice guiding me is clear, and the hand on my shoulder sure. It’s a quality we used to call "character", a quality of soul, that keeps me turning the pages. When I look up from the book I see through the window I hadn’t noticed all morning: outside the returning birds are industrious as ever — and singing.”
— Marie Howe, author of The Good Thief and What the Living Do

“Robert Fanning’s poems originate from some uncanny place between a fevered imagination and a keen intellect. They are musical, dangerous poems — both sparing and wild. This poet searches for language and meaning in a mysterious world. What the poems offer, instead, is more mystery. More dream. More strange and lovely imagery and music. Robert Fanning is the real thing — a brave traveler in the sensory world, the subconscious, the realms of the dead and the very-much-alive — and he has emerged with these brilliant, startling, compelling poems”.
—Laura Kasischke,author of Fire and Flower and Gardening in the Dark.

James Hart III

White Holes

James Hart III, of Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood, is the curator of the Zeitgeist poetry series and the author of the watchable book (Weightless Press, 2003). His work has also appeared in the Café Review, Wayne Literary Review; Dispatch Detroit, Volumes 6 and 7; pasttentspress.com and thedetroiter.com.

Robert Lipton

A Complex Bravery

Robert Lipton is the author of Bearing Witness in the Promised Land. In: Live from Palestine (South End Press). His stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals, both on and offline, including Echo 681, Interbang, Jacaranda Review, Squaw Valley Review, King Log, Shades of Contradiction, The Texas Observer and Parthenon West. He has received grants from Berkeley Community Arts and Alameda Community Arts Programs, was for seven years poetry workshop leader at Berkeley Art Center.

“ This is the book of childhood, love and war. Lipton’s poems are a gang that takes no prisoners: his voice is direct, his tone is clear, his diction is ironic — but his irony is earned and felt-through. The manuscript is a book of elegies that refuse to go mourning without at least a little bit of protest. Whatever his loss is, Lipton’s voice’s always quirky and alive, always ready to report the world straight to us, without patronizing, for “this battle is parent by parent / and I have homework to do.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Musica Humana

Robert Lipton’s poems are “like a wind/blowing through a bombed-out house” and he knows “what that bomber is.” He writes from the consciousness of the bombed and “the living narrator.” World weary, grieving, cynical, ironic, raging, from the real to the surreal, A Complex Bravery is of the drek of our world gone mad, “the features of erotic despair.” “This is where I keep my mother&rsuo;s love.” But “Even after all this/there is singing about paradise.” “Not Me in Nablus ” is one of the important poems of this era.
—strong>Sharon Doubiago author of Hard Country, Body & Soul

Caroline Maun

The Sleeping

The Sleeping, with two of its poems having been nominated for the 2007 Pushcart Prize, is the first book of poetry by Caroline Maun. She is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott (National Poetry Foundation, 2005). She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1998. She was an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Morgan State University from 1998-2004. While at Morgan State, she served as founding Writing Center director and co-coordinator of freshman composition. She has also served on the executive committee and as treasurer of the Middle Atlantic Writers Association. Since 2004, she has been an assistant professor of critical literacies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. Recently, she was named one of two recipients of WSU’s Academy of Scholars Junior Faculty Award for 2006. She lives in Grosse Pointe Park.

“Caroline Maun’s The Sleeping is a compelling and intimate exploration of the self. In language that is at the same time sophisticated and coherent, Maun offers startling images of her body as it is acted upon by the doctor, the rapist, the lover. In other poems the poet bears witness to terrifying narratives —the cicadas who return every seventeen years only to emerge and to die. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the volume is Maun’s ability to recall private places and through them create universal images of childhood, sexuality, and death.”
—Mary Jane Lupton, Author of Menstruation and Psychoanalysis

Daniel Padilla

Solute

Daniela Padilla studied writing at Albion College in Albion, Mich., University of Detroit-Mercy and Washburn University in Topeka, KS., and in several workshops. Also an artist specializing in pastel drawing, his writing is also enhanced by his studies of the visual arts in the streets, galleries and museums locally and throughout the United States as well as in Central America, South America and Europe. He lives and works in his studio in Plymouth.

Even when Padilla’s speakers prove to find themselves immobile, or unmoving, as in “Wanderlust,” even in this static state the body still exists, there is the “I am” of presence, and through it all, even at its darkest hour, the heart still seeks: “my body/ambitious/desire.” Here in these poems, here in this world, “a light remains.” This is a book that, standing at the center of it all, speaking out to us from the heart”s deepest desire, is a voice that conjures up and paints for us a portrait of the artist as a young man, a young man who is a young poet who, like a child who sees more of the world than us adults do with our tired eyes, “build[s]/ ideas/ in a sandbox/ hoping for rain.”

Alexander Suczek

Witness of Music

In addition to his longtime service to Pro Musica Detroit, Alexander Suczek’s involvement in classical music and the arts began while a student at Harvard University as a company member of the Brattle Theater. Since then, Suczek has performed as a classical guitarist and folk and art singer and headed a summer concert series for 25 years. For the past several years, he has authored a weekly column in the Grosse Pointe News, "State of the Arts." In 2006, he was decorated by the Austrian government for promoting that country’s image in arts and music in the United States. Now retired, he was a writer and executive for Campbell-Ewald. He now spends his time at his homes in Grosse Pointe Farms and South Padre Island, Texas.