September 17, 2009

Marjorie Rommel is a former newspaper reporter, photographer, and editor, and has driven a logging truck, cooked for a logging camp, worked as receptionist in a fly-by-night instant-salvation-by-hypnosis studio (the kids were hungry), and raised a large family. She provided public/media relations services for the City of Auburn and for the Tukwila School District, has taught creative writing in Puget Sound-area community college, and served as a visiting lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University. She was a Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation resident in 2000, and in 2001 received a White Bridge Traveling Fellowship from the Adam Family Foundation to live and write in Teton Valley, Idaho. She was awarded the Bloom’s Day Prize for Short Fiction in 2002, and earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU in 2007.

Shadowbyrd, aka “The Voice,” was first published in 1965 and has been performing poetry in his distinctively theatrical style for more than forty years. In that span, he has done most of the usual poet things as occupant of what he describes as “a centrist niche in the poetry spectrum, located somewhere between academic ennui and street noise.” Perhaps the best description of Shadowbyrd has been furnished by Malcolm H. Kenyon, who calls him “a bete noir with tangled mane and ringingly unrepentant trochees.”