ABOUT NINE MILE
Nine Mile Magazine publishes twice yearly, showcasing the best work we receive from authors whose work, energy, and vision seem to us most deeply entangled with life. Our name comes from Nine Mile Creek, a 25-mile long waterway formed 14,000 years ago by glaciers in our region. Like our namesake creek, Nine Mile is varied and surprising, with different writings coming together to form a cohesive whole.
Our purpose is to bring great writing, and great talk about writing, to our readers, without consideration of school, style, or form, but with a special focus on Central New York. This includes writers within and outside the mainstream, writers with disabilities, writers of color, writers with marginalized genders and sexual orientations, and writers from different cultures and religions. We produce this magazine in inclusive and accessible formats. We believe that poetry is everyone’s art.
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We also produce the Talk About Poetry Podcasts on iTunes & at Soundcloud, where working poets engage in a freewheeling discussion of poems that interest us. Our book series is also available here, and some also on Amazon and Apple books.
BOB HERZ
Founder and editor
Bob Herz is a graduate of Hobart College and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He worked some years in the NYS Legislature, where he wrote the state's Poet Laureate and Fiction Laureate laws, the Arts & Cultural Affairs law, the Albany Writers Institute and many others. He is author of three books of poetry and four books of translations.,
STEVE KUUSISTO
Senior Editor
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.
ANDREA SCARPINO
Senior Editor
Andrea Scarpino (she/her) is a writer, teacher, editor, disability activist, foodie, yoga student, wellness enthusiast, middle grade reader, kitty foster mom, and Women's World Cup fanatic (among other things!). She is the author of four poetry collections: Once Upon Wing Lake (Hoot 'n' Waddle Press,2017); What the Willow Said as it Fell (Red Hen Press, 2016); Once, Then (Red Hen Press, 2014); and the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Andrea earned her PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and was the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL
Associate Editor
Christopher Merrill is an American poet, essayist, journalist, translator, and since 2000, director of the International Writing program at the University of Iowa. He led the initiative that resulted in the selection of Iowa City as a UNESCO City of Literature, a part of the Creative Cities network. In 2011, he was appointed to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also published translations, several edited volumes, and six books of nonfiction. His work has been translated into nearly 40 languages, and his journalism appears in many publications. Merrill's honors include a Chevalier in 2006 from the French government in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of the Arts and Letters ), an order of France whose purpose is the recognition of significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields. His most recent books include a collection of prose poems, Flares (2021); Self-Portrait with Dogwood (2017); and a poetic collaboration with Marvin Bell, After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts (2016).
PAMELA (JODY) STEWART
Associate Editor
Pamela (Jody) Stewart, is a true “boomer,” New England born and bred. She began writing in grade school because she couldn’t draw. She has taught creative writing at ASU, University of Arizona, UC Irvine, and University of Houston. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim and traveled to Cornwall, UK where she then lived for 7 years. Jody returned to western Massachusetts and in 1994 she, and her family moved to a farm to raise fiber animals. Over the years she’s published in a number of magazines, received 3 Pushcart publications, and has written 6 full-length books including The Red Window (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), and Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010.) A chapbook, Just Visiting, was published by Grey Suit Editions, London, 2014. She still lives on the farm with three dogs, some elderly sheep, a rescued horse, his donkey, several goats and old pigs.
CYRUS CASSELLS
Associate Editor
Cyrus Cassells recent writings include The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, which was a finalist for the 2018 Balcones Prize, the NAACP Image Award, and the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Award; Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan (2019), and More Than Watchmen At Daybreak (Nine Mile Books, 2020). He is the current poet laureate of the state of Texas. He has also won the National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and two NEA grants. His new book is The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022).
JAMES CERVANTES
Associate Editor
James Cervantes books include From Mr. Bondo’s Unshared Life, Sleepwalker's Songs: New & Selected Poems, Temporary Meaning, The Headlong Future, The Year Is Approaching Snow, and Changing The Subject, a dialogue in poems with Halvard Johnson. He was editor of The Salt River Review for thirteen years. Cervantes has been publishing poetry in print since 1969 and almost exclusively online since 1997. Retired since 2006, he and his wife, two dogs and a cat were repatriated by the pandemic and live in the mountain community of Payson, Arizona.
NORMAN DUBIE
Associate Editor
Norman Dubie is the author of thirty collections of poetry. Dubie's work often assumes historical personae and has been widely published, widely praised, and included in numerous Norton anthologies of poetry. His 2015 collection, The Quotations of Bone, from Copper canyon, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, for which the judges said,“Dubie’s uncontested mastery of the lyric poem has, in this collection, broken into strange and revelatory territory.” Other honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award. In 2002, he won the PEN Center USA prize for his collection, The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems. His most recent books include: Quotations of Bone (2015), and Robert Schumann Is Mad Again (2019), both from Copper Canyon Press.