Contributing Editor

J.C.Todd

J. C. Todd has authored two chapbooks of poems, Nightshade (2000, 1995), and Entering Pisces (1985), both published by Pine Press. Nightshade, a finalist in the Flume Press chapbook contest, is distributed by Spring Church Books. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and Beloit Poetry Journal and her translations of poems by the Ecuadorean writer Ivón Gordon Vailakis in Crab Orchard Review. She wrote the entries on Lucille Clifton and Etheridge Knight for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English.

Todd has received a Fellowship in Poetry and professional development grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations for poetry. She has been a fellow in poetry at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Hambidge Center. Recipient of a New Jersey Governor’s Award for Arts Education and a Distinguished Teaching Artist award for poetry workshops offered through the New Jersey Writers’ Project, she also teaches in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College and the poetry program of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She is a 2001-2002 recipient of the Leeway Foundation Inspiration Award for Emerging Artists. The award is for a poet who has not yet published a full-length collection. The Leeway Foundation awards grants to women artists in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. (Photo of J.C. Todd by Joanna Lightner. All rights reserved.)

Remarks on Entering Pisces and Nightshade:

“The work of the poems of Nightshade is the emptying of a powerful well of absence, drawn up from silence word by word. . . . The controlled and exact language, the recurring and coherent imagery, the exact bodily details, the artistry of it all reveal how difficult this story was to unearth. . . .” —Eleanor Wilner, from the foreword to Nightshade

“Entering Pisces is wonderful. Polished, powerful, top-rate.” —Rita Dove

“Her poems are not mere observations but observances, full of permanent rewards. Todd’s love of words and of the world is greedless and real. . .a sensitive, tough humanity, beautifully rooted in place and time.” —Robert Bringhurst

Nightshade is distributed by Spring Church Books. Phone #: 1-800-496-1262
P.O. Box 127
Spring Church, PA 15686

J.C. Todd’s work can be found online at:

www.frigate.com

www.grdodge.org

www.cortlandreview.com

"Why I Teach Poetry," an on-line supplement to the PBS special Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers, Fall, 1999 is located at www.pwnet.org

Email J.C. Todd