umüvme features BARBARA CROOKER.  The author of more than 650 poems published in over 1975 anthologies, books, and magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, and America, Crooker is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and thirteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Her full-length books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize;  Line Dance, which came out in 2008 from Word Press and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More, forthcoming  from C&R Press in 2010.  Garrison Keillor has read seventeen of her poems on The Writer's Almanac, National Public Radio, and she recently read in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress.

Check out the podcast of last week's show featuring MEL BRAKE.