BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF OUR WORKSHOP LEADERS:
Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She earned her Ph.D. in English (specialty in American Literature) from the University of Arkansas, and in 1978 she joined the faculty of the University of Delaware English Department, where she founded the Poets in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than 12 years. Her books, essays, and individual poems have won many awards. Her tenth collection of poems, The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his Contemporary Poetry Series from the University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Her collection of memoir-essays, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her memoir with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets: Two Lives, came out in 2018 from Green Mountain Press. She has co-edited two books, most recently On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers. She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-2007, when she retired from the University of Delaware and moved to Traverse City, Michigan.
Born and raised in northern Michigan, Terry Wooten had his imagination sparked by nature, trains, ghost towns and folklore. He attended Western Michigan University, working toward a degree in Education, writing poetry on the side. In 1980 he met poet Max Ellison who taught him the magic of the oral tradition and has been performing his poetry and the work of over 100 other writers as a bard ever since. So far, Wooten has published sixteen books.
Poetry Society of Michigan 