Zavatsky awarded MacDowell Fellowship

upstreet poet Bill Zavatsky has been awarded a Fellowship by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, for the second summer in a row. He will spend five weeks during June and July at MacDowell, which is the oldest artists’colony in the United States.

Bill Zavatsky’s work appeared in the second and third issues of upstreet and will appear in the upcoming fourth issue. He holds BA and MFA degrees from Columbia University and has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose, 2006). A poem that appears in that collection and also in upstreet number two, “Live at the Village Vanguard,” received a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology. A longtime jazz pianist, he has written poems for CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has also published translations of several French poets, including (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, by Valery Larbaud, which will be reissued this year by Black Widow Press of Boston. Bill lives in New York City and teaches English at The Trinity School. Earlier this year he was named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.