For eleven years, Bob Grumman has been staving off starvation as a poet by working as a K-12 substitute teacher in Port Charlotte, Florida. He composes all sorts of poetry but is best known for his mathematical poems. It is to those his most recent book, April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now (Otoliths, 2008), is devoted. Also a poetry critic, he has been a regular columnist for Small Press Review since around 1990, has contributed entries on poetry and poets to several reference books such as The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, and had two books about poetry published. At present, he is working on one about Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18."

I wanted to show how I connect to the teachers who will be my main audience, and impress them--without scaring them by telling them about my theory of psychology, or even how intense I am about taxonomy (or who wrote the works of William Shakespeare).