The poems in A Tree Becomes a Room are located in many places including Italy, Russia, Hawaii, Florida, France, Texas, Minnesota and elsewhere. These different places are roots of the same tree that stands in the midst of a threatened and still beautiful earth. Through multiple locations, White explores how we might continue to live inside this vanishing with all the tools that have always been at our disposal: wonder, grief, hope and joy. The poems are meditations on this perilous moment in time and the demands that this moment places on anyone to stay curious and grateful even in the midst of our inability to change course or self-correct with a view toward the greater interconnectedness of all things.

J.P. White has published essays, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in hundreds of places including The Nation, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, Agni Review and Poetry. He is the author of the novel, Every Boat Turns South and The Last Tale of Norah Bow, forthcoming in 2024. His 6th book of poems, A Tree Becomes a Room, was the recent winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from White Pine Press in September, 2023. He is the editor-at-large for Plant-Human Quarterly.

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Duet in the Little Blue Church... is an engaging poetry collection as well as a record of one midwestern woman’s writing life.

Sharon Chmielarz was born and raised in South Dakota. She taught German for thirty years in Minnesota and has had three children’s picture books and fourteen books of poetry for adults published. Her book, The Other Mozart, was made into an opera. Kirkus Reviews has called her writing “… thoughtful, bold, humorous, earthy, and humane …” She’s the (living) SDSPS 2021Poet of Merit. Her latest book is Duet in the Little Blue Church, New and Selected Poems, spring, 2023. She welcomes visits at www. sharonchmielarz.com.

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The poems in The Oratory of All Souls center themselves in fundamental human concerns, especially those connected to personal and community suffering. Their sources are memory, the historical moment, the local objects that compose each, and the "terrible love of our imagination" that makes them new in language. In these poems, the speakers map roads into and out of grief, adopting the role of lover, father, citizen searching for insight or the right way to live. Finally, it becomes a book about breaking and mending, injury and forgiveness, and about our search for resurrection in, and of, daily life.

Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back west to Oregon. Robbins has received awards or residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Anderson Center, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. From 1986 to 2014, he directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State Mankato, which the Minnesota Humanities Commission called, "the premier small-town reading series in the country."

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The poems in The Saint of Everything honor certain collisions of memory and imagination, respect melancholy, consider the meanings of betrayal and tenderness, love, losses, and violence. It began as a vision of saints and murderers, and became more than that.

Deborah Keenan is the author of eleven collections of poetry and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer. Her new and selected collection, Willow Room, Green Door, received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. A professor in the MFA program at Hamline University for thirty years, she now teaches, as she always has, for The Loft, and privately. She lives by the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers in beautiful, mysterious St. Paul.

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