Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life

Sharon Bryan, coeditor of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), is also the author of Flying Blind, her third collection of poems which appeared from Sarabande Books in 1996. The first two collections, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, were published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton, 1993). Her awards include an Academy of American Poets prize, the Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in 1993. She teaches as a visiting writer, most recently at Missouri State University in St. Louis.

William Olsen is the author of two collections of poetry, The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988) and Vision of a Storm Cloud (TriQuarterly, 1996). A third volume, Trouble Lights, will be brought out by TriQuarterly in November, 2001. Olsen is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, The Nation/Discovery Award, a Texas Institute of Arts Award, a Bread Loaf Fellowship, and poetry awards from Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Republic, Chicago Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, New American Poets of the Nineties, The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Poets of the New Century (Godine, November 2001), and many other magazines and anthologies. He teaches at Western Michigan University and in the MFA Program at Vermont College.