Photo by Ellen Friedman
[Scroll down for reviews.]
I am the former NH State Poet Laureate (2014-2019)
Degrees:
Master’s —Creative Writing/Literature//Poetry, University of New Hampshire. Bachelor’s —Art/Art History & Literature, double major, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH.
College teaching: Currently at Landmark College, working one on one with learning disabled students in academic support, & occasionally teaching creative or academic writing. Previously at Keene State & Colby-Sawyer Colleges. Twelve years at University of NH; visitor at others, including Salem College, NC, Antioch College, OH. Courses include beginning, advanced & graduate creative writing, poetry, fiction & literature, introductory & advanced creative nonfiction, & composition. 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. (a selection): Co-founder of NH Young Writers Conference. Prison writing workshops 2018. Teacher workshop on poetry appreciation & instruction, Great River Arts, VT 2008. Plymouth Writers Institute 2009. St. Johnsbury Advanced Placement Teachers' Institute 2010. Numerous Professional Development & literary appreciation workshops with STRANGE TERRAIN, White Mt. & Fall Mt. Region & others 2009-2017. GRAI Writing Workshop 2009. Ocean Park Writing Workshops 2009 & 2013. Arts on the Edge, Wolfeboro, NH 2010. Wakefield, NH Writing Workshops 2010. OQ Farms writing workshop 2016. Etc. Poetry appreciation workshops through NH Humanites & independently. 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, through NH Council on the Arts & independently. Community-centered arts & poetry workshops. Frost Place Young Poets Conference 2008. Presentation at the Frost Place Teachers Conference 2008. Numerous Young Writers Conferences. 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. Judging for poetry & other contests: O’Hara Awards judging 2013. Bauhan Publishing May Sarton Poetry Award (national poetry manuscript award) judging 2012. Bauhan essay competition judging 2016. Bright Hill national poetry manuscript competition 2016. Alice James poetry manuscript competition. NH Charitable Funds high school poetry contest (30 yrs), New England Writers 1999, Maine Arts Council 2001, NH Arts Council 2002, Poetry Out Loud NH segment of national program, 2006-2019.
Facilitating (a selection): Past, ongoing, & currently, many lecture/workshop sessions on publishing & poetry independently & for numerous organizations including NH Writers’ Project, for whom I also co-organized & taught when implementing 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: Editing; guest blogger on poetry at Gwarlingo; guest craft exercise blog for Diane Lockward, included in The Crafty Poet II; 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; costume building for theatre; organize fine arts exhibits, performance cabarets, hands-on arts workshops. River Singers choir, ongoing. Sewing professionally (custom, refashioning, & theatrical costuming). Long-distance backpacking on the Appalachian Trail & other hiking whenever possible. Member NH Writers’ Project, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Poetry Society of NH; National Parks Association, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Appalachian Mountain Club; Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund.
As New Hampshire Poet Laureate:
Initiated the position of Teen Poet Laureate
Led writing workshops for many different populations, including women in prison & refugees
Edited & published (with Hobblebush Books) an anthology of NH poets, Poets’ Showcase
Compiled a list of reading venues in NH
Compiled a list of published poets in NH, with towns & counties
Coordinated a collaborative traveling exhibit of NH artists & poets
Organized a day-long poetry festival at the state library
Organized simultaneous state-wide library events for Poetry Month
Wrote “occasional” poems for Governor Maggie Hassan & for the community college system
Raised funds through a reading event for the Organization for Refugee & Immigrant Success
Collaborated with Portsmouth Poet Laureate to teach creative writing to immigrants through International Institute of New England
Organized a group reading of all New England poets laureate
Gave Martin Luther King Jr keynote address
Worked with multiple other groups including the elderly in assisted living facilities, the mentally ill, children of all ages, attendees in churches, private home salons, & libraries.
Books:
Nothing But, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021
A Doubtful House, Bauhan Publishing, 2017
Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations 2015, Schaffner Press (Winner of the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the NH Literary Award in Poetry)
Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader, Hobblebush Books, 2009
Be That Empty, Harbor Mountain Press 2007 (National Poetry Foundation bestseller 2008)
I Love This Dark World, Zoland Books 1996
Elemental, Zoland Books 1993
Anthologies (a selection): Best American Poetry 1993 Lay Bare the Canvas: New England Poets on Art 2013 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 Ice Cream Poetry Anthology, World Enough, 2016
Like Light, Bright Hill Anthology 2017 Ripple Effect: Water Stories 2018
Essays: Gwarlingo; Chautauqua Review; Earth Tones; Hospice; Writing on the Wall
Graduation Speech:
https://thedailyvonnegut.com/essays/how-heroes-saved-my-life-by-alice-b-fogel/
CDs, Audiotapes: NH Poets Read Poetry; Alice B. Fogel Reading Selected Poems (Distributed by Tupelo Press.)
Poems in journals (sometimes more than once; a selection): A Capella Zoo, A Fine Madness, Adanna, Alice Blue Review, Amoskeag Journal, Appalachia, Archaeopteryx, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street (featured), Beloit Poetry Journal, Bleeding on the Page, Bloodroot, Blue Ink, Boston Globe, Boston Review (featured), Burningwood, Chautauqua Literary Review, Chelsea, CHEST, Christian Science Monitor, Cider Press, Cold Mountains Revew, Conscience, Construction, Crab Creek Review, Crazyhorse, Crazy Quilt, Cream City Review, Cross, Daily Vonnegut, Di Mezzo Il Mare, DIAGRAM, Frisk, Full Bleed, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, Guesthouse, Hole in the Head, Hotel Amerika, Hootenanny, Hospice, Hubbub, Indefinite Space, Inflectionist, Inkwell, Iowa Review, Ironwood, JuxtaProse, Larcom Review, Lumina, Many Mountains Moving, Marlboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Mayday Magazine, McNeese, Minnesota Review, Mom Egg, National Poetry Review, Negative Capability, New Rivers, No Tell Motel, Notre Dame, Ozone Park, Phoenix, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, Rattapallax, Red Brick Review, River Oak, Seneca Review, Shore, Slice, South Florida, Southern Poetry Review, Spillway, Spittoon, The Journal, Talisman, Third Coast, Tar River, TriQuarterly, Two Hawks, Upstairs at Duroc (Paris), Washington Post, Westchester Review, Wild Roof, Women Arts Journal, Worcester Review, World Letter, Write Action Anthology, Yale Letters, Yankee Magazine, Zone 3, others.
Awards & Honors: NH State Poet Laureate, 2014-2019. NH Literary Award in Poetry 2016 (Interval). Guy Owen Award from Southern Poetry Review 2019 (“Saturn”). 2012 Writer in Residence at the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site homestead in NC. 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. Poem included in online Best American Poetry, 2010. 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. #4 on national poetry best-seller list, 2008 (Be That Empty). Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature (Interval). 12 Pushcart nominations. Nominated for “Best of the Web.” Invitation to give graduation speech, Fall Mountain Regional High School. Featured on Poetry Foundation website.
REVIEWS
For A Doubtful House:
Challenging, wildly inventive, philosophical, as intense as it is intimate, A Doubtful House reveals and deepens
our understanding of the strangeness within the ordinary. Fogel’s poetry is a wounding. Her boundarypushing
syntax emphasizes the inevitable connects and disconnects of human beings in close proximity. A
Doubtful House is ambitious and risk-taking, yet there’s a vulnerability in Fogel’s voice that humanizes and,
yes, even celebrates that common struggle to remain ourselves while giving so much of that self to another.
This is one house you have to revisit many times to fully explore even a single room.
—John Sibley Williams, author of Disinheritance
A Doubtful House is many houses—houses we build and inhabit and share and clean, but not easy domestic
places. These houses fly, dream of themselves, sigh, advise, age, leak, rot, wait, and think. They cook and envy
and navigate and cringe and recline on their own recliners. They fear and love and doubt. These houses are
made of walls and doors and rooms and insulation and porches and windows and floors and “closets that
clear their throats.” Unexpected monkeys and blueberries and even moments of happiness rush out when we
open the doors. We are the “houselings,” and in the end, we are “unhoused,” and freer than before.
—Lesle Lewis, author of A Boot’s a Boot and lie down too
Alice B. Fogel’s elegant book, A Doubtful House, explores the shifting meanings of a place where two people
live, love, and change over many years. Even the table of contents reads like a poem; and each of the pieces in
the book is shaped, more or less, like a roofless house. (Contemplate, please, the metaphor of a house with no
roof.) Fogel examines joy and pain, closeness and distance, in often fragmented phrases of astonishingly lyrical
beauty. “. . . stake a claim to who you can be / in possession of or repossessed,” she writes. It’s complicated.
This is a compelling volume. Savor it.
—Susan Terris, author of Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems
for Interval
In The Literary Review January 2016: “...much like Bach’s work or Gould’s disparate interpretations of it, these poems are able to at once convey a kind of formal unity while also displaying invention and eclecticism. . . . By allowing the source material to create a kind of scaffolding without dominating the work—and by allowing these poems to exist both inside their prescribed structure and outside of it—the reader becomes ensconced in an arresting and affecting meditation on the nature of identity and existence, of the spiritual and the earthly, of time and memory.” --Mark Gurarie
Alison Hawthorne Deming:
“Alice Fogel’s Interval is a marvel of poetic discipline that mines Bach’s Goldberg Variations for formal inspiration. While the project has a mathematically precise conception, the poems have the feel of meditative inquiry--intense, introspective and informed by a keen eye cast outward.”
Sarah Gorham:
“Brilliant. An ambitious impression of the Variations [using] many of that work’s structural elements, as well as addressing Bach’s themes and the deeper implications of what music can say of spirit and human-ness. [Interval’s] language has a fluid, beautiful sonic appeal and effect; one might even call it Baroque.”
Previous 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.
- home >
- vita & reviews >