POETRY IN THE PARK 

Steve Abbott is a native of central Ohio and was a co-founder and writer for the Columbus Free Press. He has been a courtroom bailiff, a private investigator, and director of communications for a social service agency. He was a founding member of The Poetry Forum at Larry’s, which has sponsored Monday night readings at Larry’s Bar in Columbus since 1984.

An associate editor of Pudding Magazine: The International Journal of Applied Poetry, he is also faculty advisor for Spring Street, the literary and arts journal at Columbus State Community College, where he is a tenured full professor and lead instructor of creative writing, teaches composition and creative writing, and hosts a twice-quarterly Open Mic Coffeehouse. He was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry in 1993 and an OAC residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1994.

His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Wind, Birmingham Poetry Review, and The Heartlands Today as well as the anthologies Prayers to Protest: Poems That Center and Bless Us (Pudding House Publications, 1998) and Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (Bottom Dog Press, 1996). His history of the Columbus Free Press appeared in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam-Era Underground Press (Mica Press, 1991), which will be appear in an updated edition late in 2008. His chapbook A Short History of the Word was published in 1996, and his collection Greatest Hits, 1982-2003 was released in 2006. With Columbus poets Rose M. Smith and Connie Everett, he edited Cap City Poets, an anthology of Columbus and central Ohio poets, forthcoming this month (April 2008) from Pudding House.

Photograph courtesy of Steve Abbott.                  All rights reserved.