Phil Brady teaches poetry, creative nonfiction, and literature as well as directing the Poetry Center at Youngstown State University. Brady's most recent book, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust-Belt Bard (University of Tennessee Press, 2008), was named Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year in Essays. His latest book of poems is Fathom (Word Press, 2007). His memoir, To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife appeared from Ashland Poetry Press in 2003, and Weal was the 1999 Winner of the Snyder Prize from Ashland University Press. His first book, Forged Correspondences (New Myths), was chosen for Ploughshares Editors' Shelf by Maxine Kumin. He also co-edited, with James F. Carens, Critical Essays on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Twayne Publishers). Brady received the Ohioana Award in Poetry in 2008. He has won five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Awards, Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State, and residencies at Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and the Soros Centre for the Arts in the Czech Republic. Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork in Ireland, and on the faculty of Semester at Sea. At YSU he directs the YSU Poetry Center and Etruscan Press and plays in the New-Celtic band, Brady's Leap. He directed the NEOMFA from 2004-2006.