Poetry. "Cecilia Woloch's SACRIFICE is an extraordinary debut. These powerful, tender, and compelling poems introduce us to a family album of marvelous and charming figures. And, in the poet's romance of the family, the intoxicating presence of the father is its profound center of gravity. Yet the poet's reverence and affection for the idea of family is inevitably troubled, we discover in later poems, by the unravelling of a marriage...Woloch's poems unveil the wreckage of love after what has been sacramental turns sacrificial. Her poems are by turns reverential, devotional and incantatory--they are prayers spoken to, and on behalf of, a difficult world"--David St. John.

CECILIA WOLOCH was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. Her books of poems are Sacrifice (Cahuenga Press, 1997), a BookSense 76 selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (Cahuenga Press, 2002); and Late (BOA Editions, 2003) for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004. A chapbook manuscript, "Narcissus," was chosen winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Competition and will be published in 2007. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.