Excerpt 2, from Courtship

TRAVIS CEBULA is originally from Colorado, but currently lives, teaches, and creates in Maryland. He earned an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School in 2009, the same year he founded Shadow Mountain Press, a small press specializing in the creation of hand-made chapbooks of poetry. In addition to his editing and publishing duties he dabbles in photography, is a freelance graphic designer, teaches creative writing at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, and is a member of the permanent faculty at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris, France.

His poems, essays, stories, and photographs have appeared internationally in various print and on-line journals, including New American Writing, Aufgabe, Fact-Simile, Third Coast, and Eleven Eleven, just to name a few. He is the author of five chapbooks, including Some Exits, Some Colors Will Touch Regardless, and, most recently, …but for a Brief Interlude at Versailles from Highway 101 Press (2011). He has written two full-length collections of poetry: Under the Sky They Lit Cities, published by BlazeVOX Books in 2010, and Ithaca, which is his most recent collection. It’s available now from BlazeVOX Books. A new collaborative effort with Sarah Suzor, After the Fox, will be released in 2014 by Black Lawrence Press.

In 2011 he was gratefully awarded the Pavel Srut Fellowship for poetry by Western Michigan University. Current projects include the Oracle project, which is an attempt to involve artists all over the world in an ongoing, pseudo-prophetic conversation.