Author Description

Something Must Happen, Ned Balbo's new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, examines history's unfolding through the prism of contemporary life. These memorable poems look toward past and future: the twentieth century fades, taking with it the Titanic's last survivors and Times Square's forgotten incarnations, while a future in which minds and memories are mapped beckons menacingly. At this crossroads, questions of faith are inescapable: a Baghdad snowfall brings respite to soldiers and stunned residents, a boy and his dog wander lost in nineteenth-century New York, while, in the late '60s, a boy sells broken space toys while a friend's older brother prepares to leave for Vietnam. Throughout Something Must Happen, something always does, yet Balbo's response to time's passage is always thoughtful, formally confident, and deeply moving. Author Biography Ned Balbo is the author of two full-length collections. Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press), received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and was a finalist for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize of the Lilly fellows program. His first collection, Galileo's Banquet (Washington Writers' Publishing House), was awarded the Towson University Prize. The recipient of three Maryland Arts Council grants, he has received the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. "My Father's Music," an essay on adoptive identity and ethnicity, and a finalist for both the Faulkner/Wisdom award and the Laura Pizer Prize, appears in Creative Nonfiction's anthology of Italian-American prose, Our Roots Are Deep with Passion (Lee Gutkind and Joanna Clapps Herman, editors). A Long Island native, he teaches at Loyola University Maryland and lives in Baltimore with his wife, poet-essayist Jane Satterfield, and her daughter Catherine.