Presenters

	Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. During the ‘70s he published 11 books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the ‘80s, he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow. Recent books of poetry include What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? and Collected Prose Poems and Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, both published by Harper Collins. His second large prose book, The Sibling Society, is the subject of nationwide discussion.
	Larry Woiwode’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, GQ, Harpers, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and a variety of publications. His books include What I’m Going To Do, I Think, Beyond the Bedroom Wall (finalist for the National Book Award and Book Critics Circle Award, and Association of American Publishers’ Distinguished Book of Five Years to present to the White House Library), Indian Affairs, Silent Passengers, and the memoir What I Think I Did, his sixth book named “notable book of the year” by the New York Times Book Review. In 1995, he received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, presented every six years, for “distinction in the art of the short story.”
	Dale Jacobson was Tom McGrath’s close friend and student for two decades. At one point McGrath referred to Jacobson as “the best of the young American poets.” Jacobson has published eight volumes of poetry and has written extensively on the work of McGrath, who called him his “best critic.” He edited the authoritative edition of McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Larry Woiwode referred to Jacobson’s long poem “A Walk by the River” as a “masterwork“ and the poet Robert Hedin described it as “masterfully written.”
	Robert W. Lewis is the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Peace Studies at UND, and, since 1982, has been the editor of The North Dakota Quarterly. The Fall 1984 issue of North Dakota Quarterly was the first edition of McGrath’s novel This Coffin Has No Handles. Commercial publishers rejected this, some saying it was “too political” and others “too poetical”.
	Mark Vinz has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in numerous magazines and is the author of several books of poems. In 2005, Larry Woiwode named him an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and suburban Kansas City, attended the universities of Kansas and New Mexico, and since 1968 has taught in the English department of Minnesota State University Moorhead. He also serves as the first coordinator of the school’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program and the co-director of the Tom McGrath Visiting Writers Series since its inception in 1986. Vinz met Tom McGrath in 1969 and they soon became close friends as well as colleagues, also collaborating on a number of projects, including issues of the poetry magazine Dacotah Territory, which Vinz edited from 1971-1981, and a chapbook collection of McGrath’s poems, Voices from Beyond the Wall. Vinz has written essays on Tom McGrath both as a mentor and as poet, such as “Words for a Vanished Age-a Memoir.”
	Pamela Sund is a painter and art critic whose reviews and feature articles have appeared in W.A.R.M Journal, New North Artscape, Vinyl, and Art Papers Magazine. She was a student of Tom McGrath in the early 1980s and remained a close personal friend until his death in 1990. She has completed a manuscript on McGrath entitled Thomas McGrath: Poet; Revolutionary; Folk Hero. Contributors include Dale Jacobsen, Robert Bly, Mark Vinz, Studs Terkel, Larry Woiwode, Linda McCarriston, and Sterling Plump.
	David Martinson I first met Tom McGrath around 1970. I hadn’t read Tom’s work at this time and he gave me one of his books, asked if I wrote, and invited me to show him some poems. I started attending gatherings at his house where students, beginning and well-known writers, artists, counter-culture politicos and old-line labor reformers would talk, listen to jazz, eat his wife Eugenia’s fantastic Greek food or Tom’s humble potato leek soup, and imagine ourselves as members of a world-wide commune with regional distinctions. Around his dining room table I found sense in Tom’s mantra, “Dakota is everywhere.” When the four books of Letter to an Imaginary Friend were published in 1990, Ev enlisted my help to edit a special edition of The Shining Times to reprint selections from Tom’s work in a tabloid format free to the public. In 2000, the Council published another tabloid, Thomas Matthew McGrath: Selected Poems, which Ev asked me to edit.