April Ossmann is the author of WE (Red Hen Press, April 15, 2025)  and Event Boundaries  and Anxious Music, both from Four Way Books, and has published poetry in numerous journals including New England Review and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books), and is the recipient of several awards for her poetry, including a  Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Readers' Choice AwardPrairie Schooner. She has also published essays including Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript (Poets & Writers), and a biography and critical study of poet Lynda Hull in American Writers Supplement XXI (Charles Scribner’s Sons).

She taught as a poetry editor-in-residence for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe. She also teaches guest poetry workshops regionally, using a non-traditional workshop method she developed intended to teach poets to revise their work more objectively (as an editor would), and has taught creative writing and literature courses at Lebanon College and at the University of Maine at Farmington. She was Executive Director of Alice James Books from
2000 - 2008.
 
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 Poems from We online:

"Corridors," "Knee-Deep," "Dark Suite for My Country"

Interim, Vol. 37, Issue 2

Video: "Peace Hymn for the Republic"
sung byJulie Ness (21:24 - 24:18):
Our Voices, Bodies Rising: director & choreographer Peggy Brightman, filmmaker Carla Kimball

Audio:
“Non-Partisan” voiced by Sam Sanders to music composed and played by Aaron Marcus, “Garden Dreams” CD:


AUTHOR INTERVIEWS & FEATURES


Poets Cafe Interview About Event Boundaries
Write the Book Interview About Event Boundaries
Capital Public Radio Insight Interview About Event Boundaries
Valley News Interview
Poetry Now Interview About Event Boundaries
Kate's Miscellany Interview About Event Boundaries
Vermont Arts Council Interview About Event Boundaries
The Southeast Review Online Interview About Anxious Music
 
Poems from Event
Boundaries Online:

New England Review: "When Your People Call My People to Arrange a Meeting"

Laurel Review: "Event Boundaries"

The Poetry Foundation:
O, Chicago, O’Hare”


PRAISE FOR EVENT BOUNDARIES

Library Journal

Ossmann…explores the connections between love and death—and their centrality to life—while weaving a tapestry of associations. The poems are beautiful and subtly witty, complicated and deceptively honest…"  
–Karla Huston
  
Goodreads

…with regard to the possibilities offered by April’s poetics, boundaries are not sharp edges; instead, they are dimensionless membranes analogous to the cosmological event horizons of black holes…Jane Kenyon had the immutable “otherwise;” April has the mutating otherwise. Robert Frost had hay fields; April has force fields. Vermont poets have sturdy apple orchards; April has immaterial auras. Auras as transitory— and marvelous—as orchids…I highly recommend Event Boundaries.  
                                                                                        Therese Broderick


PRAISE FOR ANXIOUS MUSIC


Publishers Weekly

“…a voice remarkable for its confidence and fierceness…her style suggests long acquaintance with the conventions of intimate, autobiographical 21st-century verse and a daring all her own.”

Library Journal

“These poems exhibit a quiet, considered intelligence rare in first collections. Ossmann…writes of desire tempered by wisdom and self-restraint…throughout lurks the fear of breaking loose and spinning away, to the point where ‘when we learn the answers/will we have forgotten/all the questions.’ Recommended.”  –Ellen Kaufman

Pleiades

"This book concerns itself with this territory–a kind of Rorschach, a shifting of foreground and background and the huge question posed in many guises of how to contain or embrace or release desire. Ossmann's best poems have this quality of controlled panic, an intelligence able to articulate and tolerate alarming paradox."                                                                                    –Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Poets’ Quarterly

“Ossmann explores life’s many arenas and their attendant imperfections with the precision of a surgeon and the sharp wit of a polished conversationalist. Eschewing perfect closure, her poetry achieves a fullness which matches the range of life as it truly is, from its quotidian depths to its delightfully soulful surfaces.”  
                                                                                            —Christina Cook

Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers

“Known in the industry as a excellent editor, we are not surprised to find Ossmann’s Anxious Music an extremely taut and well crafted volume.”         Kenny Brechner

www.kingdombks.blogspot.com 

“So much of this poet's language is new and inquiring that I found myself reading often two or three times through a poem before turning the page… every question is the start of an unexpected and delicious answer. I'll be reading this collection again. And again.” 
                                                                                                   —Beth Kanell



Email address:  aprilossmann@hotmail.com


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