What We Reap, 22 x 30, Watercolor and ink on paper, 2003
Bertha Rogers, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, is a poet, translator, visual artist, and educator. More than 250 of her poems and critical reviews have appeared in such journals as Many Mountains Moving, The MacGuffin, Connecticut Review, Laurel Review, Karamu, Nimrod, Chelsea, Pivot, Yankee, and Barrow Street; and in several anthologies. Her poetry collections include Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991), The Fourth Beast (Snark Publishing, 2004), For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (Six Swans Artists Editions, 1999), and A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Society and Review Competition (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, 2000). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, was published in 2000 by Birch Brook Press, Delhi, NY, and her interdisciplinary Beowulf exhibit with readings and workshops toured the U.S. from 2000-2002. In 2005, she published Even the Hemlock, a collection of words and images from her "Even the Hemlock: Reliquaries and Illuminations" exhibit, traveling throughout New York since 2003. The exhibit and book were funded through grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program. She has also received a fellowship from the AE Foundation. Her word-and-image works are in the Harry Ransom Collection, the University of Texas and other public and private collections. In 2007 her exhibit "The Stones & Bones of Delaware County" was awarded a NYSCA grant and was exhibited in museums and galleries in Delaware County, NY and at the Hamilton Club Gallery, Paterson, NY (March-April 2008).
Rogers has held residency fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Caldera Artists Colony, Hedgebrook Foundation for Women Writers, Jentel Artists Residency, Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat (Scotland), and the Julia and David White Artists Colony (Costa Rica). In October 2001, she was a poet-representative of the US at the International Poetry Festival in Trois Rivieres, Quebec. In 2002, her poem "Rhomboid" was named winner of PhiloPhonema's International Lyric Recovery Poem Competiiton by Alfred Corn, judge, and was published in the Rain of One Ocean Anthology (Headwaters Press, NYC, 2003). Her poem "Truck Stand" was selected by John Ashbery for a 2004 exhibit at Albany International Airport commemorating the Millay Colony's 30th anniversary. Rogers's visual art has been shown in more than 200 juried ehxibits and solo shows throughout the US, including New York City's Steve Bush Gallery, Plieades Gallery, and the New York Public Library; in New York state, at the Old Froge Library, the Smithy-Pioneer Gallery, the Erpf Catskill Center, Schweinfurth Art Center, Auburn; AAO Gallery, Buffalo; the Walt Meade Gallery at Roxbury Arts Group; Mountaintop Gallery, Windham; Greene County Council on the Arts Gallery, Hudson; Kleinert Gallery, Woodstock; Washington and Jefferson College, PA; Matrix Arts, CA; The New Art Forum, MA; Abilene Fine Arts Museum, TX; Rutgers University Gallery, NJ; and many more.
From 1999 through 2001 she served on the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Panel. She is the founding director and editor in chief of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York's Catskill Mountain Region. As director, she serves as administrator of the NYSCA Literary Curators Web Site, www.nyslittree.org and the New York State Literary Map, http://www.nyslittree.org/html.map.
She has been, for many years, a poet and visual artist in residence for arts in education programs in schools, workshops, and colleges, including Hartwick College, SUNY Potsdam, and Wells College.
