Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok images the world in the most human colors imaginable. With language that’s playful and effective no matter the degree of the subject’s solemnity, Hicok hit the mark with soul-stunning accuracy with every phrase, every line, every stanza, and every poem.
Taslima Nasrin
When Nasrin read at a past Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival, her self-translated poems, which use very simple language to convey emergencies and atrocities, strike directly at the core of sympathy. And underscoring the various plights highlighted in her works is a sense of hope as expressed in humanity despite itself through reason.
Italo Calvino
I fell for Italo Calvino over his If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but came to love his writing for its ability to portray a childlike wonder for the world and infect readers with the same. One book in particular, Invisible Cities, is a collection of micro-fictions concerning fantastical worlds of metaphor that seem equal parts postcard and poem.
Nicelle Davis
If you want to fall in love with how words can, you want to read Nicelle Davis. Any book will do; her ability to weave the fantastic with the banal and the playfulness with which she does it, in varying tones, is awe-inspiring.
Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is the grandmother everyone wants – kind, wise, stern, inquisitive, and spiritual on a level which few achieve. She opened her art to the forces that guide us all – human and otherwise, and the softness of her guidance becomes the betterment of all who read her.
With a fiendish addiction to all things caffeinated and fermented as well as a thorough knowledge of how to waste time, Ink disrupts his neighbors’ dreams by taking recycling out at odd times and singing too loudly along with whatever song fits his mood. He once asked the world if it wanted him, and the small packet of poems he found in his breast pocket notepad after the fog cleared turned into 61 Central (Finishing Line Press). Ink remains fortunate enough to reside in New Jersey. inkthepoet@gmail.com