Bates.

Jaed Coffin

Coffin, Boston Globe critic James Sullivan wrote in 2008, “has been preparing for a writing career for years. Like his hero Ernest Hemingway, he has traveled the globe in search of experiences — sea kayaking from Seattle to Alaska, backpacking around Mexico, and, yes, spending several months at the bullfights in Spain.”

Coffin’s first book is A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo/Perseus, 2008), which recounts his time in Thailand. Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and in a cover story in the Globe, A Chant is now taught in the multicultural curriculum at colleges and universities including Brown, St. Michael’s, Middlebury, and University of Maine, Farmington.

Coffin was honored as a resident fellow at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, where he researched his forthcoming novel, Roughhouse2012.

Gizzi’s numerous books published by Wesleyan include Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007) and Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003). In spring 2014, Wesleyan will publish Gravity & Fire: Selected Poems 1987-2011.

Gizzi has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad. From 2007 to 2011 he was poetry editor for The Nation.

He has been on the faculty at Brown University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and at Cambridge University. He currently works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Lee Sharkey | Carl Little

Maine poet Lee Sharkey.

“Sharkey’s deft and deliberate fusion of the global with