Steve Kowit  (b. 1938) LINKS Steve Kowit http://www.flagstaffcentral.com/bookfest2000/Authors/kowit.html The Flagstaff Central’s Book Selection highlights Steve Kowit here with a photograph and brief biography of his writing background. Welcome to Ploughshares, The Literary Journal http://www.pshares.org/Authors/authordetails.cfm?prmauthoriD=850 This site reprints two of Kowit’s poems, “The Black Shoe” and “I Rendezvous with Jim & Lenny at the Barnes.” In addition, Jane Hirshfield recommends Kowit’s book The Dumbbell Nebula. Kowit (Poem) http://www.webdelsol.com/tlr/poems/kowitpoem.html The Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing, which has been published quarterly by Fairleigh Dickinson University since 1957, reprints Kowit’s poem “The Kiss” from his collection The Dumbbell Nebula on their Web site. BIOGRAPHY Steve Kowit (pronounced COW-it) was born in New York City and educated at San Francisco State University in California (M.A., 1968) and at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina (M.F.A., 1992). Kowit received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as the Atlanta Review’s Paumanok Prize for poetry (1996). Since 1990, he has held the position of professor of English at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California. His poems have been published in Poetry Now, Wormwood Review, New York Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. The title poem of his first collection, Lurid Confessions, (1983), is reprinted in the anthology ,Stand Up Poetry: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond (1990). In a note to the poem, the editor describes Kowit and the other poets included in the anthology as not so much favoring performance over print as moving “away from the dour and ponderous, toward creativity, spontaneity, and childlike (not childish) joy.” His most recent collection of poems is The Dumbbell Nebula (2000).