photo by Lisa A. Ventre

John Philip Drury is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, and Sea Level Rising—from Able Muse Press. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary, both from Writer’s Digest Books. His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. He was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and grew up in Bethesda. He earned degrees from Stony Brook University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for thirty-seven years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.