Shawn Pittard is the author of three slender chapbook volumes of poetry: Witness, which was a Finalist in The Poetry Box 2024 chapbook contest; Standing in the River, the winner of Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition; and These Rivers from Rattlesnake Press. 
 
He’s been a coach for Poetry Out Loud and a California Poet in the Schools, taught recitation and writing in middle schools and high schools, including juvenile hall (yep, they’re good kids), as well as with veterans and the men in Folsom Prison. By day, he labored in the field of environmental protection, planning, and public policy, focusing on energy. 
 
I’m Thinking About Death
 
Not my death or your death
not even my mother’s death
in my very arms but death itself
that voyeur always lurking
timebomb in the heart
seed of cancer in the sunburned nose
patient opportunist who I sometimes see
in the beaks of vultures
perched in the riverbank trees
or the angels etched into the frieze
at the cathedral.
Is it death who whispers
slow down
when you should know that there are deer
on the forest road this time of night?
Or says
go for it
when you look into the black water
from the jumping rock above the bridge.
 
David Koehn won the May Sarton Poetry Prize with his first book, "Twine" (Bauhan Publishing, 2013). Judith Kitchen in the Georgia Review applauded it as “illuminated and complicated by invention.” He published "Compendium" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), revisiting Donald Justice's approach to prosody. Koehn's second book of poems, "Scatterplot" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020), per a review in Gulfstream, "helps make sense of the world."  "Sur," his third full-length
collection, was released by Omnidawn in the fall of 2024.  Koehn's writing appears in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, McSweeney's, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzva, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He earned his BA in Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. David has taught a post-graduate workshop, “Prosody as A Form of Revision,” for the last decade and a post-graduate workshop, “Forms: Breaking The Bowl,” for the past five years,  both online for Omnidawn.
 
SUR https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo237307940.html
 
 
Working Backwards
 
This collage will air dry just after a shellacking
Of wheat paste coats the strips of music,
The arcs of empty crossword puzzles,
 
The geometries of partly cloudy skies.
All emerge through window frame cut from the B
In the window’s E of the house. The H-shape
 
Of chair snipped from the chair. Linda’s call cuts
The music in the air from its mobile,
A suspension of sailboats tacking the ennui
 
Of worry into a distant journey’s tilted
Keel. Dried violets muddied in the glue:
She describes a TV Show where a philandering
 
Husband gets his comeuppance. This is the map.
A latitude and longitude of this stravaig clipped
Into one-inch squares and pasted into every third pane.
 
You make your bed the garden box of coincidences.
One year the year of concord grapes, another the year
Of radishes and zucchini, the next, one box
 
Always a plenty, the untended, irrepressible
Suite of edible not-quite-lovelies: tumbleweed,
Goosefoot, common yarrow, mingled
 
With the untamed delicacies: borage,
Nasturtiums, rosemary, and the cosmos.
 
from Subtropics