Tony Barnstone: "Oh, Great, He Gets To Go on Vacation"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Tony Barnstone’s “Oh, Great, He Gets To Go on Vacation,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Tony Barnstone’s collections of poetry include Sad Jazz: Sonnets, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2005, and Impure, published by the University Press of Florida in 1999, as well as a chapbook, Naked Magic (2002), which won the Mainstreet Rag Chapbook Contest. His most recent book of poems, The Golem of Los Angeles, won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry in 2006 and was published by Red Hen Press in 2007. He won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry in 2008 for Tongue of War (forthcoming from BKMK Press).

Barnstone has edited and/or translated various books of Chinese poetry and prose, including Chinese Erotic Poems (Everyman Press, 2007), The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor Books, 2005), The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1996), Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (University Press of New England, 1991). He has won fellowships and poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, The Sow's Ear Poetry Contest, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Competition (Chester H. Jones Foundation), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award, and the Poetry Society of America. Tony Barnstone is the Albert Upton Professor of Creative Writing and English at Whittier College.

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