Helen Ruggieri 111 N. 10th St. Olean, NY 14760 helen@helenruggieri.com
Ruggieri has a book of short prose pieces (haibun) from Foothills Publishing called The Character for Woman, about living in Japan, and a book of poetry, Glimmer Girls, from MayapplePress. Other titles are The Poetess, Concrete Madonna, and Rock City Hill Exercises. Additionally, a book of haiku and a book of haibun, The Character for Spirit, are forthcoming.
She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for work in the following anthologies:
- Poems of Francis and Clare: St. Anthony Messenger Press
- Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Penn State UP
- 20 Years of Uncommon Nature Writing: Wood Thrush Books
- Knocking on the Silence: Poems of the Finger Lakes, Foothills Publishing
- Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains, Salt Marsh Press
Ruggieri teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PA and in the Arts in Education Program in Cattaraugus, Allegany and Chautauqua counties. She spent a semester teaching in Japan at Yokohama College of Commerce and is a member of the East Asian Faculty Association at the University of Pittsburgh.
Her poetry has appeared in many small press publications including The English Journal, Earth’s Daughters,, River Styx, Blue Line, Snowy Egret, Sports Literate, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Hawaii Pacific Review, del sol review, Valparaiso, Hiram Poetry Review, Coal City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Minnesota Review, Labor, Icon, Red River Review, Poetry Midwest, Poetry Magazine, Adirondack Review, and more.
Current prose publications include
- an essay, Holy Ghost at Heart Lake, in Illuminations: Expressions of the Personal Spiritual Experience, from Celestial Arts Publications;
- Home is Where You Keep Your Stuff, in How I learned to Cook, from Putnam Tarcher;
- Fragmentary Writing (journal entries) from Impassio Press;
- Horse Crazy, from Adams Publications;
- and others.
Japanese verse forms (haibun, haiku, senryu) have appeared in publications in Turkey, Japan, Belgium, England, Russia, Slovakia and Japan in the Mainichi Daily News, the Yomiuri Daily, World Haiku Review, etc. She has won several awards for haiku from Japanese publications and teaches workshops on Japanese verse forms.
Google “Helen Ruggieri” for a listing of publications, some sample poems and a full biography from the PA Literary Network. She studied with William Stafford at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and with John Balaban at Penn State where she received her MFA. Balaban said of her work: Ruggieri, with an intense regard for right diction and informing imagery, looks at those things that come her way and saves them for us, saves them from passing into oblivion, saves their enduring values.
Ruggieri is a master gardener and has a black sash in Tai Chi.