Deanna Pickard
In the last year of her life Deanna Pickard published two collections of poetry, Lose Them If You Can and In Dreams We Kiss Ourselves Good-Bye.
Her poetry appeared in Antioch Review, Blue Unicorn, Chelsea, Cincinnati Review, The Comstock Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, The New Republic, Nimrod Awards, Issue XIII, Passages North, Poetry, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Witness, and Zone 3—Rainmaker, Awards Issue, among other fine literary journals.
Her poems also appeared in the anthologies O Taste and See: Food Poems and I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems about Ohio, which featured “Not Poor,”. Pickard's poetry won many contests, including the 2004 Paul Laurence Dunbar Poetry Prize, The Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition, The Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and in 2003 The Literary Library Contest in Dayton, Ohio. She received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District. In 2003, Ms. Pickard was named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Association. Pickard passed away in 2004 after a three-year battle with cancer.
Samples of Deanna’s Work
Books by Deanna Pickard
Erika Tweed
Erika Tweed was born and raised in Austria, and resided in Troy, Ohio until her death in 2005. She had a BS in education from Wright State University and taught German for 12 years at Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio. After her retirement, Tweed wrote poetry based on mythology and her Austrian heritage
Miriam Vermilya
Miriam Vermilya was a retired grade school teacher and a well known painter and writer in Greenville, Ohio. The day before she died unexpectedly in January of 1999, she met with the Greenville Poets to assemble her poems into the manuscript, Heartwood, that won the Walt McDonald First Book Awards from Texas Tech University Press. This volume was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was also a Finalist for the 2000 Foreword Book of the Year Award in Poetry. Vermilya's poems sum up her reflections on life, love, marriage; the deaths of friends and family, and most poignantly, on her own aging and death.
