James Bertolino
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James Bertolino’s poetry has been appearing internationally in books, magazines and anthologies for over 40 years. His first book was published in 1968, and his most recent of 25 titles appeared in 2009. Bertolino’s poetry has been recognized nationally by the Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship, the Discovery Award, a Hart Crane publication award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Quarterly Review of Literature book awards and, in 2007, the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize for Washington State Poets.

Ten volumes and fifteen chapbooks of his poetry and prose have been published by such publishers as Copper Canyon Press, Carnegie Mellon University Press, New Rivers Press, Ithaca House, QRL Award Series at Princeton University and Cherry Grove Collections. Two of his out-of-print books have been reprinted by the Connecticut College Contemporary American Poetry Archive. He holds an MFA from Cornell University and taught creative writing at Cornell, Washington State, University of Cincinnati and Western Washington University. For the 2005-06 academic year, he was Writer in Residence and Hallie Ford Chair of Creative Writing at Willamette University in Oregon. He has since retired.

Hundreds of magazines, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Notre Dame Review, Indiana Review, Partisan Review, Florida Quarterly, Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Raven Chronicles, StringTown and Crab Creek Review, have printed his poems.

Anthologies include Poets Against the War from The Nation Books; Under A Silver Sky: Pacific Northwest Poetry from Evergreen State College; The Writer’s Journal from Dell Publishing; Saints of Hysteria from Soft Skull Press and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets from Oregon State University Press. His latest poetry volume is Pocket Animals: 60 Poems, published in 2002 by Egress Studio Press, and the most recent prose book is The Path of Water, an interview-memoir conducted by Mathew Campbell Roberts, 2008, Stone Marrow Press. He spent the month of March, 2008, as a resident artist at the Espy Foundation in Oysterville, Washington. He lives on five rural acres with Anita K. Boyle near Bellingham, Washington.