Poet Laureate 2011

 

Amy Small-McKinney 
Amy Small-McKinney is the author of a new collection of poems,Life is Perfect (BookArts Press), and two chapbooks of poetry, Body of Surrender (2004) and Clear Moon, Frost (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Cortland Review, The Pedestal Magazine, upstreet, Blue Fifth Review, SAND, Berlin’s English Literary Journal, Switchback (U of SF), and LIPS Magazine. Small-McKinney was guest editor for the June 2006 issue of The Pedestal Magazine and recipient of the 2011 Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship, judged by several poets, including Peter Murphy and J. C. Todd. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, selected by poet, Christopher Bursk. Her poetry was part of a collaboration of women artists and poets for the project, The Poetry Dress, at the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. She is founder of the program, Finding Our Voices: Poetry & Resilience, using poetry to help others, particularly those struggling with mental health, to find their voices.

“I was immediately won over by the complexity of the language in the deceptively local poem “Dillsburg, PA,” a poem hardly provincial in its immersion of us in the syntax and in the setting.” This poet is not afraid to try all the tools available in poetry, all the ways it can take form on the page, all the ways it can tease and mystify and provoke us…”

Christopher Bursk

2011 Celebrity Judge