June 3rd, 2020 – Bertha Rogers and Kate Hanson Foster
Bertha Rogers is a poet, visual artist, and educator. Her poems appear in literary journals and anthologies, and her poetry collections: Wild, Again (Salmon, Ireland, 2019), Heart Turned Back (Salmon, Ireland, 2010); Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries (2005); and several chapbooks. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was published in 2000, and her translation with illuminations of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, was published in 2019. She has won writing and visual arts awards and residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, and others. She has received several NYSCA Decentralization and NYFA grants for her interdisciplinary work, including 2014 and 2016 awards for her Natural Catskills series, “The Wild Ones: Creatures of the Catskills.” She has edited more than 100 poetry and visual arts anthologies, and her writings on teaching and cultural diversity in arts education have been published in Open the Door, Education Week, The Poetry Foundation, and others. In 1992, with her late husband, Ernest M. Fishman, she founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center of the Catskills (www.brighthillpress.org); she retired as executive director in 2017. She serves as Poet Laureate of Delaware County. Her website is www.bertharogers.com.
Kate Hanson Foster‘s first book of poems, Mid Drift, was published by Loom Press and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award in 2011. She was awarded the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center in 2017, and her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, The Critical Flame, Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Groton, Massachusetts with her husband and three children. Her website is www.katehansonfoster.com and you can follow her on Twitter @khansonfoster.
