Vivian Shipley, editor of Connecticut Review, is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner Society, the Thin Air Magazine Poetry Prize from Northern Arizona University and was named Faculty Scholar at Southern Connecticut State University where she teaches creative writing. She also won the Lucille Medwick Award from The Poetry Society of America, the Ann Stanford Prize from the University of Southern California, the Reader's Choice Award from Prairie Schooner, the Sonora Review Poetry Prize from the University of Arizona, the So To Speak Poetry Prize from George Mason University, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North, the John Z. Bennett Award for Poetry from University of Southwest Louisiana, and the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry from Birmingham-Southern College. She has published nine books of poetry including How Many Stones?, winner of the Devil's Millhopper Contest (University of South Carolina-Aiken, 1998), Crazy Quilt, a 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist (Hanover Press, 1999), Fair Haven (Negative Capability Press, 2000), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Echo and Anger, Still (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2000) and Down of Hawk (Sow's Ear Press, 2001). .

About When There is No Shore:

"Vivian Shipley's poetry is distinguished by how much of life and life's joyous energy it manages to convey. Alternately exhilarating and tender, her voice is expansive, inclusive and arresting. Ranging from Appalachian Kentucky to Soviet Russia, she does not merely capture the memorable particulars of the landscape, but always finds a genuine human story to tell."
—Dana Gioia

"The pantheon you meet in these vivid narrative poems covers an astonishing range from Buster Keaton to Charlotte Mew; from the poet's Hardin County farmer-father to Joseph Brodsky; from Vasyl Stus, a prisoner in Perm 36, to Martha Stewart. These intelligent, densely packed poems should be read slowly, the way you savor a good sherry."
—Maxine Kumin

"Vivian Shipley is, among her many distinctions, one of America's truly eminent poets of family. Not that she is ovre-solemn (see her slam at Martha Stewart for a good chuckle), but that unlike so many of her rootless contemporaries, she comes from identifiable (and complex and ultimately lovable) "people," as they say in the South...which, like every landscape she touches, is itself complex and splendidly indentifiable. In a word, to read this splendid writer's poems is to enter a veritable world, whose sadnesses are matched only by the abiding hope and compassion of its creator."
—Sydney Lea

"I have been reading Vivian Shipley for years, and what impresses me most is her range. She writes intimately about subjects as diverse as poverty and the richness of certain foods, childhood innocence and old age, a Connecticut witchcraft trial victim and an imprisioned Ukranian poet. In addition to the range of her subjects, she displays a range of techniques, as her list poem on Martha Stewart and her glossary poem for her son display. The literary poems on Charlotte Mew, James Merrill, and Joseph Brodsky are extremely moving—but so are the nature poems. Has any other poet known so much about fishing? Elizabeth Bishop would take note. When There is No Shore is the best book by one of our fine poets."
—Robert Phillips