Columbus native Steve Abbott was a founding member in 1984 of The Poetry Forum—now the Midwest’s longest-running poetry series—and continues to co-host the weekly event. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in English of Columbus State Community College. His poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals as well as in several anthologies. He received an Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry in 1993 and the following year was the first writer to be awarded an OAC residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He has published five chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections: A Green Line Between Green Fields (Kattywompus Press, 2018) and a collection of ekphrastic poems, A Language the Image Speaks (11thour Press 2019). He edited the anthologies Cap City Poets (Pudding House, 2008), a collection of 74 central Ohio poets, and Everything Stops and Listens (OPA Press, 2013), containing work by members of Ohio Poetry Association. He also edits OPA's annual journal Common Threads, and in 2015 he represented OPA on the Ohio Arts Council panel selecting Ohio’s first Poet Laureate.