Biography

Edward A. Dougherty

In addition to writing, teaching, and editing, I've worked at a pizza shop, volunteered with homeless folks, customized The Cable Guide so viewers can schedule their VCRs smoothly, and coordinated retreats for young people for the Catholic Church. My spouse and I now live and work in Corning, New York, a city defined by hills, the Chemung River, and a glass company you may have heard of. And we are active in the area's Quaker Meeting as well.

In 2007, I was granted a State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. I am proud to teach at Corning Community College.

I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, then taught at BGSU and was poetry editor of the Mid-American Review. In 1993, my spouse and I went to Hiroshima as volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center where we stayed for two and a half years, witnessing the fiftieth anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Information about that experience is in the essay "An Offering of Memory."

Seventeen years after my masters program my two "first books"-Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree and Part Darkness, Part Breath-were published. Part Darkness, Part Breath is a meditation on violence and war and the answering forces in the human spirit, while Pilgrimage was written in Hiroshima and reflects concerns about atomic fallout -literally and culturally- but also explores journeying outside of one's home as a guest and foreigner to find familiar territory in the common ground of our shared humanity.

I co-authored Exercises for Poets: Double Bloom with Scott Minar, and it is available from Pearson/Prentice Hall. That book would not exist had Scott not believed in the approach we take to teaching poetry writing and followed through with so much of the work to make it available to readers. Sample exercises are included on this site, as is an overview to the book itself. I've used these methods to run workshops in homeless shelters and community groups as well as at the college level. Contact me if you'd like me to facilitate a workshop for your school or writing group.

In addition to my full-length collections, I have four chapbooks. A bi-lingual collection, Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree, includes work by John Bradley (editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age) and Hiromu Morishita (poet, calligrapher, and atomic bomb survivor); I was pleased to assist Eiko Ishizaki in bringing Mr. Morishita's work into English, many for the first time. The Metal of My Mouth was published by FootHills Press, and Small Galaxies won the New Eden Chapbook Award. Finally, Finishing Line Press published The Luminous House in 2007. Each of these is represented in the poetry section of the site.

Individual poems of mine have appeared periodicals in England, the US, Australia, and Japan, including in Poetry East, Cream City Review, International Quarterly, Mississippi Valley Review, West Branch, Parting Gifts, The Christian Science Monitor, and over 30 other publications.

Some of my essays have been published in Writer to Writer, Friends Journal, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Review Revue, and The Other Side. My reflections on our time in Hiroshima, "At the Crossroads," originally published in Peace Review was later reprinted in Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader. Book reviews have been presented in The North American Review, The Cincinanti Review, American Book Review, Marginalia, Alehouse Press, Pleides, and The Bookpress, among others.

I've presented sessions at the Association of Writers and Writing Program's national conferences twice, the Successful Teaching Conference, and the New York College Learning Skills Association Symposium.

I'm grateful you've visited my site, and I hope something of what you read here rewards your attention.