Marion Starling Boyer
Outstanding Literary Artist: Individual artists whose work within their field has made a significant impact within the discipline over five years or more.
Marion Starling Boyer is a professor emerita of Communication, at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. While teaching full-time for Kalamazoo Valley Community College, Boyer wrote sixty educational scenes for a video glossary, filmed under her direction in New York, for Bedford/St. Martin’s Press.
Boyer is the author of six poetry collections. Ice Hours (2023) won Michigan State’s Wheelbarrow Prize and was named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. Twice she won Grayson Books’ Chapbook competition: in 2023 for What Word for This and in 2014 for Composing the Rain. For her book, The Sea Was Far, Boyer was invited as the feature poet for Washington Island’s 2018 Literary Festival.
Boyer served three years on the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival board, co-chairing the planning committee and volunteered workshops to support the Roethke Foundation in Saginaw. Since moving to Twinsburg, Ohio nine years ago, Boyer has led workshops and served on the planning committee for Lit Youngstown. An active member of Lit Cleveland, Boyer’s led many poetry workshops including the Reading Contemporary Poetry series, a collaboration with Akron poet, Barbara Sabol. in which they have introduced books by thirty poets, such as Ilya Kaminsky, Diane Seuss, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Natalie Diaz, and Ada Limon, to readers unfamiliar with current poetry.
