Fruitlands: Maru Colbert, Gary Duehr, A.M. Juster

Maru Colbert is an engineering professor and performer. Her collegiate research and teaching span three engineering fields and she has a K12 STEM focus on chemistry and mathematics. Her spoken, written and choreographed works were featured in Denver, Los Angeles, Toronto, Windsor, Montreal, Amsterdam, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston.  Her African and Native American culture, intrinsic motivation and daily reflection inform her writing, singing, acting, instrumentation and design.  Being a double winner with her Ekphrastic entries for the MA Poetry Festival in 2021 was a great honor.  Whatever she presents in any art form is, ultimately, “what her soul releases”.

Gary Duehr has taught writing for local universities including BU, Lesley University and Tufts. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His books of poetry include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press,). His children’s book in verse is Felicia the Ferret and the Atom Smasher from Thurston Howl Publications.

A.M. Juster is the poetry editor for Plough. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. He is the only three-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and has won the Barnstone Translation Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, and four different prizes of the New England Poetry Club. His eleven books include Horace’s Satires (U Penn Press 2008,) Tibullus’ Elegies (Oxford U Press 2012), Aldhelm’s Riddles (U Toronto Press 2016) and Wonder and Wrath (Paul Dry Books 2020). Paul Dry Books will publish his first children’s book, Girlatee, and W.W. Norton will publish his translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.