John Calvin Rezmerski was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the League of Minnesota Poets. He has entertained hundreds of audiences around the upper midwest with his readings and performances, taught creative writing and journalism at Gustavus Adolphus College, and led writing and storytelling workshops for over 30 years. His poems have been published in magazines and anthologies as varied as The Wall Street Journal, Mennonite Life, New Letters, Chelsea, Nursing Outlook, Poems of Exotic Places, The Party Train, The Sumac Reader, and Tales of the Unanticipated.

His most current project is organizing the Cambria Eisteddfod, a bardic competition and festival of poetry and music to be held at Morgan Creek Vineyards near Cambria, Minnesota on June 25th. Years ago, as founder and coordinator of Minnesota Poetry Outloud, he took groups of poets to perform poetry and music in small-town festivals, parks, bars, churches, and nursing homes. A sometime actor and radio performer, he has long been committed to bringing poetry to non-traditional audiences. He has presented programs for civic organizations, professional groups (engineers, dentists, historians, librarians, nurses, Toastmasters clubs, corporate boards, religious societies, etc.), academic audiences, and school children, and has been a frequent guest at numerous science-fiction conventions, the Blue Cloud Literary Festival, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies' annual conference, the Great Plains Writers Conference, and events of the Rural America Arts Partnership. He is a member of Heartland Storytellers and the performance troupe Lady Poetesses from Hell (channeling the late Grace Lord Stoke). Awards he has received include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Devins Award, and the Rhysling Award.

Author Bill Holm writes: "John Rezmerski believes that poetry lives inside the daily speech of ordinary people.... In the poet's hands, this language begins to glow with strangeness, beauty, gaiety, wit.... These poems want you. Go ahead. Read. Your life is about to get more interesting."

PUBLICATIONS

Counting Sheep (revised and enlarged edition), Bootless Publications, 2003, chapbook

The Sheriff Next Day Answers the Reporter, Red Dragonfly Press, 2002, hand-printed broadside

What Do I Know? New and Selected Poems, Holy Cow! Press, 2000

The Frederick Manfred Reader (ed.), Holy Cow! Press, 1996

Growing Down, Minnesota Writers Publishing House, 1982

Chin Music and Dirty Sermons, a live-to-tape radio program, with a troupe of actors and music by Michael Croswell