Hostovsky poem chosen for Pushcart anthology

A poem by Paul Hostovsky, author of the upstreet number four poem “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt,” has been selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2009). The poem chosen for the anthology is “Dream,” which appeared in Volume 28 of Blueline, a literary journal published by the State University of New York at Potsdam. This was the ninth of his poems to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize (including the one that appeared in upstreet number four), but the first to be chosen as a winner.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award for 2001 and the White Pelican Review’s Hollingsworth Prize in 2005. He has two chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (2006), which won the Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition, and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (2006), winner of the Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Award. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind. Both of his chapbooks are available for the blind through Bookshare.org.

Paul’s first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is due out in January 2009 from Main Street Rag. About the collection, Jeffrey Harrison (also an upstreet poet) says: “This book kicks ass. … Equally adept with fixed or not-so-fixed forms as with free-wheeling free verse, Hostovsky shows us, over and over, in language that is always alive, what it is like to be alive.” You may visit Paul at his website.