Darren C. Demaree is a graduate of the College of Wooster, Miami University (MA), and Kent State University (MLIS). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.  He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.  “Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire” is his eleventh collection of poetry.

”In searching narratives, in plain language, in short lines, in the exploration of what it means to be in love over time, Darren C. Demaree's poems quietly soar with the beauty of the ordinary: the natural world, the daily mess, the child-rearing struggles of sweethearts in an Ohio town. The revelation of these poems is that the search begins and ends with Emily, and the shared history the couple has built a life on, which cements the speaker “in the panic of the living.” With a near-religious fervor, these poems are odes to a woman whose name becomes an incantation for love, unapologetic and unyielding, summoning the belief that love can be enough to sustain us.”

-Chelsea Dingman, author of What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018)