My Cruel Invention

KELLY CHERRY is the author of twenty-four books, nine chapbooks, and two translations of classical drama. A tenth chapbook is forthcoming any day now. Former Poet Laureate of Virginia. Member, Poets Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, NYC. NEA, USIA, Rockefeller, Bradley Lifetime Award, Weinstein Award, others. Publication in prize fiction anthologies. Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison. Eminent Scholar, UAH, 2001-2005. More info and details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Cherry. JOEL ALLEGRETTI is the author of five collections of poetry. His second, Father Silicon (The Poet's Press, 2006), was selected by the Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006. He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), the first anthology of poetry about the mass medium. MARJORIE MADDOX, Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, has published nine collections of poetry-including Local News from Someplace Else, Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award), and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize)-as well as over 450 stories, poems, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and has two children's books: A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems. Her numerous honors include Cornell's Chasen Award and Sage Graduate Fellowship for an MFA, the 2000 Paumanok Poetry Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Seattle Review's Bentley Prize for Poetry, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, and Pushcart Prize nominations in both poetry and fiction. She is the great-grandniece of baseball legend Branch Rickey, the general BERNADETTE GEYER is the author of The Scabbard of Her Throat and recipient of a Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County (Virginia). Her poems have appeared in 2015 Poet's Market, North American Review, Oxford American, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Geyer leads online workshops on writing and social media, and she works as a freelance writer, editor, and translator in Berlin, Germany.