Photo by Mariah Edson
[Scroll down for reviews.]
Degrees:
Master’s—Creative Writing/Literature//Poetry, University of New Hampshire.
BA--Art & Literature, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH.
College teaching:
Currently at Keene State College; previously at Colby-Sawyer College. Twelve years at University of NH; visitor or adjunct at others, including Salem College, NC, Antioch College, OH, Keene State College, NH. Courses include beginning, advanced & graduate poetry, fiction & literature, introductory & advanced creative nonfiction. Specially designed courses such as "On Death & Dying," "Pursuit of Happiness," “Sense of Wonder” for writers across disciplines, “Nature Writing,” “Community & Identity” & “Ethics.” Visiting writer seminars. Continuing education, “Writing from Experience.”
Other teaching, judging, etc.:
Poetry appreciation workshops. Private paid tutor for homeschoolers, & mentor / instructor of adults in all writing fields, at all levels. Artist-in-the-schools creative writing & other arts programs from K-12, including work with teachers as consultant. Community-centered arts & poetry workshops. Frost Place Young Poets Conference, 2008. Presentation at the Frost Place Teachers Conference, 2008. Numerous Young Writers Conferences. (Co-founder of NH YWC.) Long-term creative writing course for the mentally ill (Riverbend, Concord, NH). English as a second language, piano & other music, theatre arts, crafts, summer camps. Counseling of troubled teenagers. Editing of literary magazines, including 13th Moon, Antioch Review. Judge for poetry contests: NH Charitable Funds (20 yrs), New England Writers (natl, 1998), Maine Arts Council (2001), NH Arts Council (2002), Poetry Out Loud (NH segment of national program, 2006-2009). Teacher workshop on poetry appreciation & instruction, Great River Arts, VT, 2008. Plymouth Writers Institute, 2009. St. Johnsbury AP Teachers' Institute, 2010. Professional Development workshops with STRANGE TERRAIN, Fall Mt. Region & others, 2009. GRAI Writing Workshop, 2009. Ocean Park Writing Workshops, 2009. Arts on the Edge, Wolfeboro, NH, 2010. Wakefield, NH Writing Workshops, 2010. Etc.
Facilitating:
Lecture / workshop sessions on publishing & poetry for NH Writers’ Project, for whom I also co-organized & taught for their new Writers in the Schools program. New England Writers’ Conference (Hanover, NH, 1997). Artists’ time management & inspiration workshop for New England Artists Congress (Newport, NH, 1997). Poetry reading / discussion series “After Frost” (twice) under New England Humanities Council. Week-long workshop / lectures at Chautauqua, NY, 1999, 2005, 2007, 2008. Various literary discussion groups such as “What Is NH Reading,” workshops & panels for schools, libraries & organizations including NH Councils on the Humanities & the Arts, & Co. of Women. "Entering the Realm of Poetry" programs around NE & NY. Etc.
Other activities:
Writing mentor. Organize, write grants for & run school & community arts programs for all ages, including Project Week, visiting musicians, artists & environmentalists; direct children’s plays; organize fine arts exhibits, performance cabarets, hands-on arts workshops. Member NH Writers’ Project, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America.
Books:
Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader, Hobblebush Books 2009
Be That Empty, Harbor Mountain Press 2007
I Love This Dark World, Zoland Books 1996
Elemental, Zoland Books 1993
Anthologies:
Best American Poetry 1993
Poet’s Choice (Robert Hass’s selections from the Washington Post Book Review)
Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry 1987 & 1997
Women.Period 2009
Life on the Line
Out of Season
What’s Become of Eden: Poems of Family at Century’s End
1996 Women Writers Calendar
Portsmouth (NH) Arts Calendar 1996
Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry
Under the Legislature of Stars: An Anthology of NH Poets
Anthology of Hospice Writings
Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, volumes 1 and 2
Heartbeat of New England: Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poetry
2008 Poets’ Guide to NH
Best American Poetry, online 2010
Essays:
Chautauqua Review; Earth Tones; Hospice; Writing on the Wall
CDs, Audiotapes:
NH Poets Read Poetry; Alice B. Fogel Reading Selected Poems (Distributed by Tupelo Press)
Poems in journals
(sometimes more than once): A Fine Madness, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street (featured), Beloit Poetry Journal, Bleeding on the Page, Blue Ink, Boston Globe, Boston Review (featured), Chautauqua Literary Review, Chelsea, Christian Science Monitor, Conscience, Crab Creek Review, Crazy Quilt, Cream City Review, Frisk, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, Hotel Amerika, Hootenanny, Hospice, Hubbub, Iowa Review, Ironwood, Larcom Review, Many Mountains Moving, Marlboro Review, Minnesota Review, Negative Capability, No Tell Motel, Notre Dame, Phoenix, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, Rattapallax, Red Brick Review, River Oak, Seneca Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Journal, Third Coast, Tar River, TriQuarterly, Washington Post, Worcester Review, World Letter, Yankee Magazine, Zone 3, CHEST, Write Action Anthology, Di Mezzo Il Mare, others.
Awards & Honors:
National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Fellowship. Alligator Juniper Award. New England Poetry Club’s Varoujan Award. Poem included in Best American Poetry. Wildwood Competition, two honorable mentions. Morin Prize, first place. Negative Capability Magazine, honorable mentions for essay “Poetry in Mind” & for poem sequence “After Chagall.” Work in Progress Grant for YA novel from Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. Several compositions & performances of music put to my poems, from coast to coast. Five Pushcart nominations, #8 on national poetry best-seller list, 2008 (Be That Empty).
REVIEWS
Publishers Weekly:
“The marvelous specificities of her poems demonstrate a fierce and admirable passion . . . with a steadfast gaze at the natural world as intense and perfectly rendered as that of Rilke’s panther.”
Alan Michael Parker, Chelsea Magazine:
“Fogel demonstrates a fine sense of stanza--an understanding of poetic closure and dramatic timing far beyond that of most free-verse poets. . . . ‘Ravishing perception’ seems to pervade Fogel’s work, and to do so both elegantly and powerfully. . . . One can see the dance of intellect from word to word [as she] dramatize[s] the complexities of consciousness.”
David Mehegan, Boston Globe:
“Fogel’s perspective fascinates . . . has its own concrete effect on the heart.”
Charles Simic:
“To read Alice Fogel’s poems is to enter, or rather to be drawn, always toward an inner space. Every image, every word unlocks a secret door into a farther room. That, of course, takes art, and that is precisely what Fogel has plenty of. . . . Her poems shine with intelligence. Brooding and meditative, Fogel is a poet alert to every nuance of the inner life, a true phenomenologist of the soul in that New England tradition to which both Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon belong. She is one of the best poets we have.”
Laurel Blossom, Small Press Review:
“Fogel is a talented writer . . . capable of interesting risks.”
Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal:
“I like the surprises in the language . . . to keep turning in the mind. The whole book (I Love This Dark World) is a joy.”
Robert Hass, Washington Post:
Fogel’s work “twines the themes of complicated subjects, often in mesmerizing form.”
Jane Eklund, Monadnock Ledger:
"There's alchemy here. You can't help but want to lose yourself in Fogel's landscapes, to follow the choreography of her poetry to that place that's so empty it's full. This is lovely work, carefully honed and beautifully rendered and filled with the echoes of time."
Bookconscious:
"Multi-dimensional. With each subsequent reading you notice some detail you didn't see before, and the way she shapes meaning with words adds to the layered feeling of her lush pieces, like elaborately pieced, intricately stitched quilts."
Baron Wormser:
“[She pays] attention to how one thing becomes another in the sense of transformation. . . . This creates a sort of dance-like, fugue-like quality in her poems where one form or state of being turns into another before our astonished eyes. Hence the musicality and intensity of her work, reveal[ing] to us through the ministry of language the enormity of what is there in each moment of life—its presence and its subtlety and its force.”
Eileen Tabios, Galatea:
"Fogel’s collection contains poems that begin in nature but move on deftly to reveal an element alchemized from what simmers within the human unconscious. . . . In this poetry collection, there admirably is that element I don’t notice enough in contemporary poetry: Joy. These poems by Fogel, a poet described as living “off the grid” in New Hampshire, do not use nature to humble the human. Rather, they uplift in the way heightened consciousness makes one more aware."
Reader Review:
". . . a gift for bringing the most subtle states of being and awareness into language."
Colin Momeyer, http://uppervalleypoetry.blogspot.com/ :
When you separate the pages of Be That Empty and begin to read—as with any good engine—the sound you’ll hear is the hum. The metaphors yield to more intimate meanings and the rhythms jag and swoop. Alice B. Fogel focuses on the intricacies of natural images, and rarely uses a narrator. The poems stream, sparkle and dance yet without a dancer, therefore occluding the personal and choosing universal themes above all. Fogel’s poem-comets are drawn on natural beauty and a mystic's sense. This work is a honed wildness . . . origami on fire unfolding . . . luminous or phosphorescent in an increasingly exponential way.