Gray Hair Series

Ansie Baird was winner of the 14th annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her collection, In Advance of All Parting (2009). She holds degrees from Vassar College and UB, where she received her MA in English and won first prize in the University's Academy of American Poets contest. She is Poet-in-Residence and a part-time English teacher at Buffalo Seminary, where she has taught for over 25 years. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, The Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The South Dakota Review, The Quarterly, The Recorder, Earth's Daughters, and other journals. She is a former editor of Earth's Daughters. She has been the featured reader at the Burchfield-Penney Center, Center for Inquiry, Indigo Gallery, the UB Poetry Collection 2010 Reading at the Butler Mansion, and elsewhere.

Joel Lipman is an Emeritus Professor of English (since June 2012), and was for 37 years a Professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo. He previously taught at both Columbia College and the University of Illinois in Chicago, and now teaches periodically at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Art & Design. He holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin (1964 & 1968) and SUNY at Buffalo (1975). As a student he studied with and worked under the poets Gwendolyn Brooks, James Wright, John Logan, and Robert Creeley. Five-time recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry and long-time co-director of the Toledo Poets Center, Joel's accomplishments and poetry honors include the 1985 Ohio Governor's Award as an Individual Artist, a 1992-1993 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2005 Harry Ransom Humanities Center Fellowship, and a 2009 Lilly Library Fellowship from Indiana University.

Among Joel's limited edition, small press, and fine art books and chapbooks of poetry are Mercury Vapor Lamp (Ocooch Mountain Press), Provocateur (Bloody Twin Press), Machete Chemistry/Panades Physics, co-authored with Yasser Musa (Cubola New Art Foundation), The Real Ideal (Luna Bisante Productions), & Ransom Notes (Obscure Publications). Active several decades as a mail artist and visual poet, his graphic literary work can be found on-line at the Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry and Poetry Foundation websites. Referred to as "legendary" by the Poetry Foundation, Joel Lipman's visual poems have been widely published and have the distinction of publication in 2008 and 2011 by Poetry Magazine. Currently finishing the visual manuscript, The Origins of Poetry, and writing on the practice of appropriation and the found poems of Bern Porter, he resides in Toledo, Ohio, and Belfast, Maine.