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About Michael Mott

London-born Michael Mott began publishing poetry in 1948, and has published some three hundred poems in reviews, five collections and two chapbooks. His first novel, The Notebooks of Susan Berry, was a best-seller in England and was published by MacMillan in the United States. His second novel, Helmet and Wasps, was a critical success in both England and the United States. Of his two novels for young adults, Master Entrick and The Blind Cross, the first sold over eighty thousand copies in the Dell Yearling and the Penguin Puffin paperback editions.

In 1966, Mott was invited to become Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, and to teach at Kenyon College. In 1970, he began teaching at Emory University. With Turner Cassity, he founded the Callanwolde Readings Program, and in 1974 he received the Governor's Award from Georgia's governor, Jimmy Carter.

In 1978-79, and again in 1985-86, Mott was Writer-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary, where he finished the collections Counting the Grasses and Corday. In 1980 he was awarded a Guggenhieim Fellowship.

His biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, won the Christopher Award and a number of other awards in 1985-86. It was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize and remained on the nonfiction bestseller list of the New York Times Review of Books for nine weeks. He retired in 1992, as Professor Emeritus, after teaching for twelve years in Bowling Green State University's Creative Writing program.

Currently he lives and writes overlooking a lake halfway between Williamsburg and Jamestown, and is at work on a series of novels with an historical background. In 1999, Woman and the Sea: Selected Poems appeared from Anhinga Press.

Quotes About Woman and the Sea

"In Woman and the Sea, Michael Mott performs a mystery; his poems attain the surface stillness of finely sculpted artifacts, but with human blood ­ and passion, and grief, and surprising joy ­ coursing through them." —Scott Cairns

"He speaks to and for our time, from deep wells of history with a firm understanding that the present is always an experience of the past." —Guy Davenport

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About John Yau

A leading art critic, poet, essayist, and prose writer, Yau received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College. In February of this year, Black Sparrow Press published a book of Yau's prose, My Heart is That Eternal Rose Tattoo, and Borrowed Love Poems will come out from Penguin Putnam in April.

Yau's poems are dazzling explorations of the multiple, shifting sands of identity, of the fictional, fake, factual, and autobiographical selves that pass like ghosts through the empty space known as "I." In Borrowed Love Poems, the reader encounters artists (Hiroshige and Eva Hesse), poets (Marina Tsvetayeva and Georg Trakl), actors (Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre), and memorable figures (a retired wrestler and a private eye named Genghis Chan).

A frequent collaborator with visual artists himself, Yau's essay "Active Participant: Robert Creeley and His Collaborations with Artists" was published in a monograph focusing on Creeley's collaborations with visual artists in the spring of 1999 from the University Carolina Press. 100 More Jokes from the Book of the Dead presents a collaboration between Yau and the artist Archie Rand. The book includes an essay by Yau on their unique approach to poetry/art collaborations.

Yau's other works include My Symptoms (1998), Forbidden Entries (1996), The United States of Jasper Johns (1996), Berlin Diptychon (1995), In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993) and Edificio Sayonara (1992). He has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets. Yau lives in Manhattan.

About Albert Mobilio

Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper's, the Village Voice, Grand Street, Bomb, and the New York Times Book Review. His books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, and Me with Animal Towering. A book of fiction, The Handbook of Phrenology, was recently published as a limited edition artist's book (with etchings by Hilary Lorenz). Mobilio teaches writing at New York University and is the fiction editor at Bookforum.

Mobilio's short story in Four Walls Eight Windows: Anthology of Fetish Fiction, was edited by John Yau.

About Me with Animal Towering:

"The intelligence that animates all of Mobilio's celebrated essays and reviews is brightly present in these poems, glittering with quick dance steps, delirious with almost unkept promises. Every page is full of surprises, and I can't think of a poet who so succinctly and consistently astonishes me with deft moves." —Robert Kelly

About The Geographics:

"This impressive first book manages the double ground of a nightmarish surrealism and a dryly perceptive wit. It's as if Humphrey Bogart were taking a good, if final, look at what's called the world. These are poems of a survivor, urbane, intelligent, fact of hope and despair equally. The Geographics is an ultimate detox center for "reality" addicts as thinking becomes the only way out." —Robert Creeley

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