Miriam Vermilya

Miriam Vermilya, a longtime grade-school teacher and an accomplished painter based in Greenville, Ohio, cofounded the Greenville Poets in 1985. The group assembled Vermilya’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated collection of poetry, Heartwood (2000), following her death in 1999. The volume, which also won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press, contains Vermilya’s thoughts on life, marriage, the deaths of friends and family, and, most poignantly, her own aging and death.