Trouble with Daydreams: Collected and New Poems, The

Mark Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, and attended the universities of Kansas (BA in English 1964, MA in English, 1966) and New Mexico (two additional years of graduate study in English). He is now Professor Emeritus at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught in the English department for thirty-nine years and also served as the first (1995-1998) coordinator of MUM's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. His poems, prose poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over two hundred magazines and anthologies and several book-length collections. Mark is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, six Pen Syndicated Fiction Awards, three Minnesota Book Awards, the Milkweed Editions Seeing Double Competition (with Wayne Gudmundson), and the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices competition. He is also co-editor of several anthologies, including Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest (with Thom Tammaro, University of Minnesota Press) and The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry (with Robert Alexander and C. W. Truesdale, New Rivers Press). From 1971-1981, he was the editor of the poetry journal Dacotah Territory and also Dacorah Territory Press, from 1973-2007, producing over fifty chapbooks of poetry by writers from the region. He has done extensive work with K-12 students in both the North Dakota and Minnesota Writers in the Schools programs and has given poetry and jazz performances throughout the region with pianist David Ferreira and bassist Bill Law and Jeremy Cahill. He was the co-founder with Joe Richardson and president of Plains Distribution Service, Inc., a non-profit distributor of small press books and magazines by Midwestern authors and presses (1975-1981). The Plains Bookbus, a kind of traveling bookstore, visited schools and libraries throughout the Upper Midwest, also sponsoring over three hundred readings, lectures, and workshops in the late 1970s. Affinities, a gallery show of poetry and photography with Wayne Gudmundson, appeared at Plains Art Museum in the 1990s, as well as at several sites in North Dakota and he House Office Building in Washington D.C. In 2014, he was honored with the Kay Sexton Award, which is presented to an individual or organization in recognition of long-standing dedication and outstanding work in fostering books, reading, and literary activity in Minnesota. Mark and his wife, Betsy, now live in Fargo, Norch Dakota, They are the parents of two adult daughters, Katie and Sarah. 

ISBN: 978-1-946163-41-7

Page count: 194

Paperback

Publication Year: 2021