From the Desk of the Poet:

Though poetry has always been my go-to genre, I have written in others: a newspaper column on country living, three how-to books on woodcarving, a historical-research book, book reviews, essays, and book introductions. This range of genres has informed my poetry for the better, though I admit to few forays into prose fiction.

My third collection of poems, The Heft of Promise, is forthcoming from Pine Row Press, but I am assembling another. My current challenge, however, is in writing pieces based on the Thoreau quote “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” [Walden, “Visitors”] I don’t usually set out to write poems to a thematic plan, using a much more casual or rougher method. As much as Thoreau is disparaged in some quarters, his writings have informed my life and work. Is To Say addresses the adolescent rites of intellectual passage, the relationships of kin and friends and the difficult political questions of our time.

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Café Review, Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, Still: The Journal, and Virginia Writers Project Journal. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize by Midwest Quarterly (2018).