Bio
Recently Billy Collins picked three of Bill’s poems to be both short-listed and long-listed as finalists in the Fish Anthology 2022, and his poem “I Lost” was a semi-finalist in the 2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition from the North Carolina Literary Review. Bill’s book, Asphalt Heart was published by The Main Street Rag Publishing in 2018, and its chapbook version was a finalist in The Comstock Review’s 2017 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. We Have to Stop Here, Bill’s most recent book, is a recent semi-finalist in the 2020 Willow Run Poetry Book Award, and its chapbook version will be published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Bill is the winner of the 2017 Broken Ribbon Poetry Contest; a Finalist in the 2018 and 2022 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards for Poetry; a Finalist in the 44th New Millennium 2017 Awards; and a Finalist in the Writers @Work 2018 Contest for a group of poems from Asphalt Heart. Bill is the also the winner of The Antioch Writers’ Workshop Judson Jerome Scholarship and a finalist in The Beverly Prize in the United Kingdom. He has published poetry in Rattle, West Texas Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Hawaii Review, Portland Review, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, Steam Ticket, Crosswinds Poetry Journal and others. He has been anthologized in Wild Sweet Notes; And Now the Magpie and What the Mountains Yield. He has a B.A. in English from Marietta College and graduated from Ashland University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry. He won The Emerson Prize for Poetry and The Margaret Ward Martin Prize for Creative Writing.
