Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor is a photographer, novelist, and poet who grew up in Mexico, Maine, worked in the local paper mill, and attended college in Massachusetts. She has taught English to students from pre-kindergarten to graduate school, coached the Beloit College women’s basketball team, and served as Foreign Expert in China at Fudan, Nankai, Zhejiang, and Hangzhou Normal Universities. From 1976 until 2010 she served on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal. Since 1975 she has been a participant at Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father. As a photographer she has published work in national and international magazines ranging from The Chicago Tribune to Geo (Germany). Recent one-person shows include Ambassadors of Light (光之诸使)at Hangzhou Normal University, At Home in the World in North Carolina, and Beauty: A Retrospective at the University of Maine Farmington, featuring more than seventy of her works and scheduled in conjunction with the honorary doctorate bestowed upon her by that university in May, 2009.

John Rosenwald

John Rosenwald lives in Farmington, Maine, where he serves as senior editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal and, until recent, served president of the Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation. Before his retirement in 2010 he was Professor of English for 34 years at Beloit College in Wisconsin. As Fulbright Professor of American Culture and Literature, he has taught in China at Fudan, Nankai, and Zhejiang Universities; with his wife, Ann Arbor, he was invited in 2012 and 2013 to create a pilot program in Transdisciplinary Education at Hangzhou Normal University. Other recent work involves organization of exhibitions of Chinese peasant artists and collaborative translation of contemporary Chinese poets. His poems and translations from German and Chinese have appeared in numerous journals. With his wife, Ann Arbor, he has been a frequent participant since its creation in 1975 at Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, for which he was commissioned to write the history. Among his honors are the 1996 Underkofler Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2003 Zhejiang Province West Lake Friendship Award, and an Honorary Doctorate in 2009 from the University of Maine Farmington.

In 2018 both Harvest: Selected Poems and an experimental novel The Feast of Steven were published. In 2022 his translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus won the MWPA prize for Excellence in Publishing. He has given more than five hundred public readings in the U. S., China, Germany, Canada, and England. Since 1975 he has participated in the Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, originally organized by Robert Bly.