Neil Shepard has had a long involvement in the world of poetry: his eighth book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); in 2019, he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft (Green Writers Press, VT). His new manuscript, The Book of Failures, is scheduled for release in 2024. His poems appear in several hundred literary magazines, among them Harvard Review, New England Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and Southern Review, and they have been featured online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-A-Day (from the Academy of American Poets). Shepard has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and he has been a visiting writer at the Chautauqua Writers Institute, The Frost Place, and Ossabaw Island Writers Retreat. He founded and directed the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center and has taught in the low-residency MFA program at Wilkes University (PA) and in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Johnson State College. He also founded the literary magazine Green Mountains Review and was the Senior Editor for a quarter-century; since 2020, he has edited the online literary journal Plant-Human Quarterly. He currently splits his time between Vermont and New York City, where he teaches poetry workshops at Poets House. Outside of the literary realm, Neil is a founding member of the jazz-poetry group PoJazz.

Photo: Lynn Saville