Judith Vollmer Joins Alice James Books with The Pavese Stone
Photo by Ann Lee Begler.
Judith Vollmer Joins Alice James Books with The Pavese Stone
Alice James Books will publish The Pavese Stone in March 2026.
On The Pavese Stone, Alice James Executive Director and Publisher Carey Salerno says: “These poems delve into the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, bringing them together in close, entwined, inseparable conversation. Here there is resilience, elegy, longing, desire for expansion, close and keen observation, dignity. Attention is paid to the physical connections we make with others and our environment, and how these connections bring us closer to the feeling of being alive and living. At the outset, Vollmer writes, "I see places expand, / but need more focus," and the poems propel forth traveling across countrysides interior and exterior. Near the end, we embrace and celebrate the ceremony of even what we might consider to be unceremonious life, as in "here is a ring I would slide onto your finger, / a plain thread."
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JUDITH VOLLMER’S seventh book of poetry, The Pavese Stone, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2026. The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2022 University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize; other collections have been awarded the Brittingham, the Cleveland State, and the Center for Book Arts publication prizes. Reactor was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in The Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Door Open to the Fire received finalist honors for the Paterson Prize.Vollmer is recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and artist residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, Blue Mountain Center, and the Centrum Foundation, among others. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in Plume, Rhino, Barrow Street, The Georgia Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is Professor Emerita of the University of Pittsburgh/Greensburg, and recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of Pittsburgh. For three decades Vollmer co-edited the international poetry journal 5 AM. Her essay on Baudelaire, “The Stroll and Preparation for Departure,” is included in the Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge University Press). She has read her work internationally at colleges, universities, museum and galleries, arts organizations, and community centers. Vollmer has taught in low residency programs at New England College’s MFA in Poetry, the Drew University Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and most recently in Carlow University’s MFA Program. She lives in Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run watershed.
