Kevin Sweeney
has degrees from California (PA) State College and the University of Massachusetts. He is the chair of the English Department at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine where he has been for more than twenty years. He is a native of Pittsburgh and dreams of retiring someday to be an old gringo in Mexico, watching Steelers games via satellite. He lives in South Portland with his wife and pets.
Kathleen Sullivan
has been a practicing psychotherapist for forty years, a poet for only a quarter of that time. She believes there are many similarities between the work of the therapist and the poet. Her great surprise in participating in the poetry and police project is in finding how similar the policeman’s work is to both the therapist’s and the poet’s. She is grateful for the chance to have poetry be the instrument which introduced her to her Portland police poet–partner, Tim Farris.
Martin Steingesser
is author of two books of poems: Brothers of Morning and The Thinking Heart: the Life and Loves of Etty Hillesum. His poems have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Progressive, the Humanist, American Poetry Review, Hanging Loose and Poetry East. He is Portland, Maine’s first Poet Laureate (2007–2009).
Betsy Sholl
has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Rough Cradle ( Alice James Books, 2009). Don’t Explain won the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin, and her book The Red Line won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Pick A Card, winner of the Maine Chapbook Competition in 1991, and Betsy Sholl: Greatest Hits, 1974 –2004, Pudding House Publications. She lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the M.F.A. Program of Vermont College. She served as the Maine Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2011.