Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Bertha Rogers

Poet and visual artist Bertha Rogers has published hundreds of poems in journals and anthologies, and in the interdisciplinary collection Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries; chapbooks The Fourth Beast, A House of Corners, and The Reason of Trees; and the full-length poetry collection Sleeper, You Wake. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000, and she is currently translating the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book. Her poem “Rhomboid” won PhiloPhonema’s Lyric Recovery Award in 2001, selected by Alfred Corn; and her poem “Truck Stand” was selected by John Ashbery for display in the Albany International Airport to celebrate the Millay Colony’s 3Oth anniversary. She has won residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, Caldera, Jentel, Hawthorne International Writers Retreat, and Hedgebrook. She is Delaware County’s first Poet Laureate.

Her paintings, illuminations, and artist’s books have been shown in more than 200 juried and solo shows throughout the US and abroad, and she has received several New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Decentralization and New York Foundation for the Arts SOS grants for her interdisciplinary work, including a 2006 award for her solo exhibit “The Stones and Bones of Delaware County.” In 2006 she was the recipient of an A.E. Ventures Grant. In 2007 the Association of Teaching Artists named her as the the winner of the Distinguished Service to the Arts in Education Field Award at the CommonGround 2007 Conference in Rochester.

She founded Bright Hill Press (BHP: www.brighthillpress.org) in Treadwell, New York, now celebrating its fifteenth year, and serves as BHP program director, in partnership with NYSCA, for the New York State Literary Web Site and Literary Map, www.nyslittree.org.

Rogers has been a teaching artist, on and off, since the 1970s. Besides working with Teachers and Writers Collaborative, she teaches through the DCMO/ONC BOCES Arts in Education programs and with arts organizations in upstate New York, and she is a CROP artist. She has been a poet-in-residence at Hartwick College, State University of New York Potsdam, NCCC, and Wells College, and has taught creative writing at Hartwick.