Deborah Bogen:  Featured Poet Vol. 2 No. 1 Spring 2008

Born in 1950 in Billings, Montana, Deborah Bogen also spent some childhood time in Garrison, North Dakota, a very small town which seemed largely populated with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandmothers. The contrast between Billings, where most families were trying to leave farming life behind, and Garrison, which was and still is agriculturally based, was striking. When she was 15 she moved with her mother and brother to Marin County, just north of San Francisco, CA. This geographic move seemed like time travel: Montana in 1965 was nothing like California where the Berkeley counterculture movement was just taking off. She was introduced to poetry there. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were frequent readers in the Bay Area and most coffee houses and corners boasted several poets. In 1968 she went to Pitzer College to study philosophy, but anti-Vietnam War political events on campus were equally educational and after the Kent State shootings and the resulting March on Washington she dropped out of school, married a hippie and moved to Bolinas to have hippie babies. Motherhood made her more conservative so she moved to Santa Rosa, CA which seemed safe and simple. By the time the kids were 10 and 12 and the hippie marriage was over she had gone to work for lawyers as a paralegal to pay bills. When she least expected it she re-met her college philosophy teacher, Jim Bogen. They married, raised kids and made art, philosophy, science and music in Southern California till 2000, and continue to do so in Pittsburgh, their current home.

Bogen’s real poetry writing adventure did not begin until she was 47 when she took a poetry workshop run by Doug Anderson. That was followed by summer seminars at The Catskill Poetry Workshop, The Frost Place, Ropewalk and Bread Loaf. Her poems and reviews appear widely in journals includingShenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Margie, Poetry International, and Field . Her work has been featured twice on Poetry Daily and twice on Verse Daily. One of her poems has been chosen by Poetry Daily for inclusion in their new hardcopy anthology. Her chapbook,Living by the Children’s Cemetery, was chosen by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2002 ByLine Press Competition and her full-length collection, Landscape with Silos, won the 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (judged by Betty Adcock). Landscape with Silos was released by Texas Review Press in August 2006. She runs free writing workshops in her home.  For more information visit her website at www.deborahbogen.net .