April
Ossmann was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000 - 2008, and left
to launch her consulting business, helping poets to get published. Since early
2009, she has been editing poems and book manuscripts, and offering
publishing advice to poets hoping to find a publisher (or to self-publish).
She
is the author of WE
(Red Hen Press, April 15, 2025), Event
Boundaries (a finalist for
the Vermont Book Award) and Anxious
Music, both from Four Way Books, and has published poetry in
numerous journals including New England Review, Harvard 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
2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Prairie Schooner Readers'
Choice Award. She has also published essays including Thinking
Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript (Poets
& Writers, March/April 2011), and a biography/critical study of poet
Lynda Hull in American Writers Supplement
XXI (Charles Scribner’s Sons).
She
was a faculty editor for the low-residency MFA in
Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe, and
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.
VIDEO: Reading at Grolier Poetry Book Shop
Wikipedia Article
Email
address: aprilossmann@hotmail.com
