Betsy Sholl, a founding member of Alice James Books, is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently Late Psalm. Her awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Art Commission. In 2006 she was named Poet Laureate of Maine. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. Her other works include Otherwise Unseeable, which received the Four Lakes Poetry Prize from the University of Wisconsin and the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. House of Sparrows; New & Selected Poems will be published by the University of Wisconsin in spring 2019, also winner of the Four Lakes Poetry Prize.

“As she upends perspectives, her powers of synthesis, making god’s-eyes of unlike threads, are near deific.”
―Portland Phoenix

“Maine laureate Betsy Sholl is out with a seventh book of poetry that’s filled with soaring word pictures…the ideas of beauty versus darkness, grit versus comfort.”
―Portland Press Herald

“Solid, moving and thoughtful, this eighth collection from the Maine poet laureate…represents patience, affection and generous attention to whoever she loves and to what she hears and sees.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Betsy Sholl’s work has such fiery momentum and narrative drive that her poems seize her readers’ attention and never let go, drawing us into a profound contemplation of the marriage of blessing and destruction the world offers again and again.”
—Mark Doty

“Betsy Sholl’s Rough Cradle is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl’s unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision.”
—Nancy Eimers

“For Betsy Sholl, words don’t merely bring us to the edge of life’s mysteries, they enter those places and—if not ‘solve’ things—listen, lament, praise, become song. Everything can turn into poetry, if one can only find the right words, the right music. Over and over, Sholl does. Urgent, compassionate, and lyrical, this is poetry of the highest order.”
—Theodore Deppe