Stephen Haven, Director

Stephen Haven is Professor of English at Ashland University, where he directs the MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction and teaches American literature and creative writing. His book of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, was published by West End Press in 2004. His chapbook of collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry is forthcoming from Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks in the fall of 2006.

Haven’s poetry and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Image, Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and in many other journals.

He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in American Civilization from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom. His undergraduate degree is from Amherst College. Haven has been a repeat fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, twice a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature (poetry) at universities in Beijing, and has won four individual artist fellowships and one residency grant (at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center) from the Ohio Arts Council.

He is the editor of The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993), and the co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary American poetry.

Deborah Fleming, Editor

Deborah Fleming is Professor of English at Ashland University where she lives on a farm and raises horses. She has climbed in the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and Himalaya. Her first collection of poetry is Migrations, a limited edition chapbook published by Finishing Line Press.

Individual poems have been published in such journals as The Alembic, Cottonwood, Karamu, Organization and Environment, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Pennsylvania Review, Ibis, Pike Creek Review, Blueline, Natural Bridge, Sucarnochee Review, and others. She has won the Vandewater Poetry Prize and a travel fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

She is currently at work on a collection of environmental essays, a novel, scholarship on W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers, and has published articles on Yeats, Jeffers, Grennan, Leopold, and Orwell. She is author of the book "A Man Who Does Not Exist": The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge.

Sarah Wells, Managing Editor

Sarah Wells is Administrative Director of the low-residency MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at Ashland University and Managing Editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.  Wells is the author of a chapbook, Acquiesce, to be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been included in Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression.  She worked in public relations and development prior to moving to Ashland.  She is married to Brandon and has two young children, Lydia and Elvis.

Robert McGovern (1927-2002)

In 1965, Robert McGovern accepted an associate professorship at what is now Ashland University. Before that, he had taught at Radford College. McGovern was interviewed and hired for his position at Ashland by poet and fiction writer Richard Snyder, who died in 1986. Together they established the Ashland Poetry Press, an adjunct of Ashland University. McGovern, with Snyder, Joan Baranow, and Stephen Haven, saw some fifty books through the press. A writer as well as a scholar, McGovern published two books of poems, A Feast of Flesh (Ashland Poetry Press, 1974) and Fool: Selected Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2001). He  also published in journals scores of poems as well as critical works, including monographs on Louis Coxe, Hollis Summers and Judson Jerome, as well as shorter critical pieces. He held a Ph.D. in English from Case Western University, and wrote the reviews of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra for over a decade. With Snyder, McGovern developed the creative writing major at Ashland University, one of the first programs in the country. He succeeded Snyder as chair of the English Department in 1986 and retired from teaching and administrative work on campus in 1999.

Author Biography

Richard Snyder (1925-1986)

Poet, fiction writer, playwright, and Professor of English at Ashland University, Richard Snyder served for fifteen years as English department chair.  Snyder and Robert McGovern founded the Ashland Poetry Press in 1969.  Synder is the author of Practicing Our Sighs: The Collected Poetry of  Richard Snyder (Ashland Poetry Press, 1989).

Author Biography