Bertha Rogers

Bio

Bertha Rogers’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Nimrod, Pivot, Barrow Street, Confluence, Calapooya Collage, Midwest Quarterly Review, Many Mountains Moving, Negative Capability, and Yankee. Her awards include residence fellowships from the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland); the MacDowell Colony, Inc; the Millay Colony for Artists, two Pushcart Prize nominations, NYSCA Decentralization, and NYFA Poetry and Visual Arts grants. Sleeper, You Wake, her full-length collection, was published in 1991; her latest book is For The Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (1998), a limited edition artist’s book of poems and images. Her new translation of Beowulf was published in 2000 by Birch Brook Press, and her chapbook, A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Society and the Maryland Review Chapbook Competition, was published by Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, in 2000. Founder and director of the Catskills reading series Word Thursdays and Editor in Chief of its affiliate, Bright Hill Press, Bertha Rogers lives and works on a farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains. She has been a poetry and visual arts teacher in Arts in Education programs throughout New York State and elsewhere for many years. She often gives lectures and slide talks about the connection between words and images.
BERTHA ROGERS is the founding director of Word Thursdays/Bright Hill Press and its affiliates – Share the Words, Radio by Writers, and Word Thursdays Winter and Summer Workshops for Kids. She has edited many books, including The (first and) Second Word Thursdays Anthology of Poetry and Prose; Out of the Catskills and Just Beyond: Literary and Visual Works by Catskill Writers and Artists, with a Special Section by Catskill High-School Writers and Artists, the 380-page anthology and Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions: A Celebration of Contemporary Six Nations Arts (Bright Hill Press). Bertha Rogers’s poems have appeared in Nimrod, Pivot, Calapooya Collage, Negative Capability, The Seattle Review, Yankee and others; and in anthologies. Twice a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, her awards include fellowships to the UCross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (Scotland), Hedgebrook Colony for Writers, the Julia and David White Artists Colony (Costa Rica), a Carnegie Grant for Authors, NYSCA Decentralization Grants for poetry presentation and interdisciplinary installations, and SOS stipends from NYFA and the Upper Catskills Community Council on the Arts. Sleeper, You Wake, her full-length collection, was published in 1991 (The Edwin Mellen Press). Her artist’s (poetry and images) book, For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog, was published by Six Swans Artists Editions in 1998. Her CD, Farm Women (Six Swans Sounds), was recently released, and her cassette recording, For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog/The Fourth Beast was released in 1998 (Six Swans Sounds). Her translation of Beowulf, with her illustrations, was published by Birch Brook Press, NY, in 2000, and her chapbook, A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society and Maryland Review Poetry Competition, was published by Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, in 2000.