Next of Us Is About to Be Born

The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is an anthology of fifty-five poets published in the ""Wick Poetry Series"" celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Designed to be an eclectic grouping, the anthology illustrates the exciting new directions poets have been taking from the early 1990s to the present, in keeping with the Wick Poetry Center's mission of encouraging new voices. Since 1992 the ""Wick Poetry Series"" has published first books of poems by many of the country's best young and emerging poets, including Victoria Redel, Richard Tayson, Honoree Fannone Jeffers, Kate Northrop, Lee Peterson, and others. The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize is offered annually and judged by well-known poets, including Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, and C. K. Williams. The Wick Center also sponsors a series of chapbooks by Ohio poets selected through two competitions - one for students enrolled in Ohio colleges and universities and one for any poet living in Ohio. This series, edited by Maggie Anderson, has published early work by many poets now publishing their second and third books, such as Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jeanne Bryner, Diane Gilliam, Joe Bonomo, Matthew Cooperman, and Mary Ann Samyn. Including two to three poems by each poet, the range of form and subject matter of ""The Next of Us Is About to Be Born"" is varied and far-ranging. Since some of the poets were still in undergraduate or graduate programs when these poems were written, the collection makes an excellent text for use in college and university poetry workshops. In addition to the now well-known poets, there are many whose work is just beginning to be published. Guidelines for entering the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize First Book or the Wick Poetry chapbook competitions and more information about the Wick Poetry Center can be found online.

Maggie Anderson is professor of English at Kent State University, where she directs the Wick Poetry Center and the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. She is the author of five books of poetry, including Windfall: New and Selected Poems, and the coeditor of A Gathering of Poets. David Hassler is the program and outreach director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University; he conducts writing workshops throughout northeast Ohio. He is the author of two books of poems, most recently Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was named the 2006 Ohio Poet of the Year. He is the coeditor of A Place to Grow: Voices and Images of Urban Gardeners and, with photographer Gary Harwood, the author of Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community. After the Bell is the prose companion to Anderson and Hassler's poetry anthology Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School (IOWA 1999)