David R. Solheim
Photo Credit: Barbara Laman
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David R. Solheim has published poetry in over two dozen literary periodicals. In addition to the books offered on this website, the Territorial Press (MN) published two chapbooks of his work, On The Ward (1973) and Inheritance (1987). His work has also been included in several anthologies. He received the John Hove Writing Fellowship from the North Dakota Council on the Arts and was an international exchange artist in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet and is an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He has also published an interview, book reviews, and essays in several periodicals and edited anthologies of creative writing.
Solheim also had an award-winning teaching career of over 30 years, most of them at Dickinson State University and is a DSU Emeritus Professor of English. He traveled to the Peoples’ Republic of China with a North Dakota University System Faculty Group and was a visiting professor at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yang-ling, China. He has conducted creative writing workshops for kindergarten through graduate students, and for the general public including the elderly. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Gustavus Adolphus College, Stanford University, and the University of Denver. After a decade in Minnesota, he and his wife Dr. Barbara Laman (also an Emeritus Professor of English at DSU) now reside In Oregon near family members in Portland. Between them, they have five adult children and eight grandchildren. |
L. Ray Wheeler
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Having retired after more than forty years of teaching at Dickinson State University, L. Ray Wheeler is an Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy and chaired the Department of Language and Literature for several years. The founding editor of The Dickinson Review, he received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for study at the Minneapolis Playwrights' Center and a Remele Fellowship from the North Dakota Humanities Council. Wheeler has published poems and short stories, and written a novel and five plays, most of which have been staged by college and university theater programs.
Wheeler has also presented many public humanities programs including dramatic characterizations of historic persons. He holds degrees from the University of Kansas, Pittsburgh State University (KS), and the University of North Dakota. He has been an avid gardener and bird watcher, and was a charter member of the Lunar Society. He passed away in December, 2018. |
Orval Lund
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Orval Lund grew up in Lancaster, in the extreme northwest corner of Minnesota. He earned
several degrees and taught English at Winona State University for 33 years. He and his wife, Michele, are proud of two sons, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. He has published poetry in numerous journals, broadcasts, websites, readings, anthologies, and in two chapbooks, Take Paradise and Ordinary Days, both from Dacotah Territory Press, and the collection Casting Lines, a Minnesota Voices Project winner from New Rivers Press. |
Margaret Barnhart
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Actor, writer, and lecturer Margaret M. Barnhart taught writing and literature at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, ND. Her poems, short stories, and personal essays have been featured in several regional publications, and an excerpt appeared in the nationally released anthology: Leaning Into the Wind (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). In 2010 she published the historic novel Under the Twisted Cross based upon her father’s experience as a POW in Germany during World War II. She has served several seasons as a Writer-in-Residence for the North Dakota Council on the Arts and five years as writing curriculum designer and teacher at the International Music Camp in the Peace Gardens on the US-Canadian border.
Margaret resides in Dickinson with her husband Pat. They have three adult daughters, three grand children, two cats, and an extensive home garden. They continue their shared interests in music, reading, writing, and community theater. |
Michael Kincaid
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Michael Kincaid is a pre-Socratic, post-American poietes who, for the moment, is living in New Mexico.
Over the years, he has come to realize that poetry, for him, could not be a "craft" or a "received" art, a job whose description was on file and need simply be fulfilled by the applicant--but was a pursuit that required him, as poet, to redefine its parameters, grounds, and horizons; that made "the whole being and vocation of the poet a poetic question" (Martin Heidegger). ---A question whose answering is a poetic activity even when it does not assume an ostensibly "poetic" form. ("The study of the scope of poetry is poetry, and requires all the reasons of poetry for its pursuit." --Laura Riding) His engagement with the work of Heraclitus (There Are Gods Here Too, 87 Greek fragments with new translations and commentary) is a chapter of that pursuit, that study, and that answering. A more recent chapter, published by Nemesis, Lightning Dialogues: Claims and Reclamations, is also available through this website. |
Peter Martin
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Peter Martin lives in Minnesota. In addition to Once This River Ran Clear he has written twelve plays for families, most of them twisted takes on classic stories, and produced them ninety times give or take. He is writing those scripts into long stories for parents to read to their children or for children to read with a flashlight under the covers. Pete can be reached at [email protected] or in person in one of the canyons in southern Utah, which he considers his second home.
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Steve Robbins
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Steve Robbins is a retired English professor. He taught at Dickinson State University, Dickinson, North Dakota, and community college and high school English in Kansas. He holds degrees from the University of Kansas, Pittsburg State University, and Oklahoma State University. A former journalist, he has also collected oral histories for the Carbon County Historical Society. He currently lives in Red Lodge, Montana, with his wife Susie. He has two adult children, one an artist and one a music professor, and two grandchildren. Presently, he is interested in graphite pencil drawing, writing plays and science fiction, and reveling in the wondrous natural beauty of Montana. |
Deborah Ford
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Deborah Ford was born in Brooklyn, New York and received degrees from Brooklyn College, St. John’s College, and the University of Southern Mississippi. She was an administrator and faculty member at Dickinson State University. She was previously a stockbroker, a New York City high school teacher, and a professor at Carroll College. She has also published Hourly Saints, Brush Strokes, The Screaming Cowbird, and Night Song. She received the Joan Johnson Prize for Poetry.
Dana Gioia said of Ford’s poetry that it “combines two qualities I don’t see often enough in contemporary verse—ruthless compression and fierce honesty. She is not afraid of reaching for the imaginative energy of her dark side, but she has learned to control the dangerous passions. Without these two virtues, descriptive poetry can easily seem inconsequential; with her combination of talents, however, it becomes a way of seeing the world without illusions.” |
Mark B. Spitzer
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Mark B. Spitzer is a native of North Dakota. As a youth he worked in tourism in the Black Hills and studied Earth Science and Political Science as an undergraduate. He was the owner of a geophysical engineering company in Dickinson, North Dakota for nearly twenty years. In 1989/90 he became the first to descend the entire length of North America's longest river system. He ran for political office in the 1990s and came in second.
Since then he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in theatre, has worked on more than 200 productions and has been teaching at colleges and universities throughout the Midwest. |
Jim Heynen
Photo Credit: Doug Kurata
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Jim Heynen, best known for his short-short stories about “the boys,” Is published widely as a writer of poems, novels, non-fiction, and short fiction. Among his titles are: The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap (Graywolf Press, 1979); The One-Room Schoolhouse (Knopf, 1993); The Boys’ House (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001); and Ordinary Sins (Milkweed Editions, 2014). He and his wife, retired journalist Sarah T. Williams, live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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