Name April Ossmann Education Dartmouth College | Role Poet Books Anxious Music: Poems | |
Norwich Bookstore An Evening of Poetry Ina Anderson & April Ossmann April 2017
April Ossmann is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007), and has had her poems published in many literary journals including Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, Passages North, Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009), and Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury College Press, 2002). Her awards include a 2000 Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award. Publishers Weekly, in reviewing Anxious Music, wrote that Ossmann’s voice is "remarkable for its confidence and fierceness."
Ossmann was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000–2008, presiding over a period of growth that, according to Poets & Writers, saw the press budget more than double in size, and saw the publication of the best-selling Here, Bullet, by Brian Turner, which garnered major media attention. According to Publishers Weekly, which interviewed Ossmann on the occasion of Alice James Books’ thirtieth anniversary, "the press received a three-year, $250,000 stabilization grant from an anonymous donor...With the grant, the press added two full-time staffers, upgraded its equipment, and launched a website with secure online ordering. The press also signed with a trade distributor for the first time, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution." According to Valley News (West Lebanon, NH) reporter Kristen Fountain, “It was an all-consuming, life-changing position, during which she stabilized the company's financial structure, increased its output and helped push its books into the national press.”
Ossmann is currently a publishing, editing and writing consultant and teaches poetry workshops at The Writer’s Center in White River Junction, Vermont. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington and at Lebanon College, and has performed at Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing residencies and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a visiting publisher.
Ossmann was born in Santa Barbara, California and raised there and in Richmond and Vacaville, California. She moved to Vermont in 1985, and worked her way through college as a waitress, receiving her A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1992, then earned her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Before working for Alice James Books, she worked as an assistant, and then associate, editor for the University Press of New England for over three years. She currently lives and works in Post Mills, Vermont.