About

Who We Are

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Richard E. Brotbeck
University of Guam
AA in Engineering Theory, FLEASWTRACENPAC, U.S. Navy

I was educated on the Island of Guam while my father served as a government agent with offices in Saigon, Manila, Bangkok, and Singapore, during the Vietnam War. My mother had a BA in English from Tennessee Wesleyan University and my father had an MS in Aeronautical Engineering from Oklahoma State University. Literacy and penmanship were elementary in our house.

When I returned home from five years in the navy, specializing in submarine warfare and SONAR electronics, I took a job assembling the highly advanced and technically cutting-edge robotic stage show seen at Showbiz Pizza Place. After that corporation was taken over by Chuck E. Cheese Pizza and the complex and expensive to maintain robotics was removed, I moved back to Kansas City and took a variety of jobs including Clearing House/FRB courier and Environmental Compliance Specialist at Cook Paint and Composites in North Kansas City.

In 1989, I took a job as the lighting and sound electrician at a small nightclub in downtown Kansas City called The Tuba. In 1991 the owner made me a partner in the company, and we began a series of concerts and pub crawls, many involving world famous Jazz performers like Mose Allison and Eddie Harris. We were gaining regional popularity and prestige until legal disputes with ASCAP and the owner of the parking lot we leased drove us into bankruptcy in 1994.

After we closed the club, I opened a home-based music publicist and accounting firm. I did well enough with that as a night job while I worked as a construction staff accountant at U.S. Engineering in Kansas City, Missouri. When Mark Valentine offered me a job helping put on the 2005 Kansas City Music Jazz and Blues Festival. I jumped at the chance.

We held several events at the old Woodlands Dog and Horse Racing park in Kansas City, Kansas. One of the events was my concept, E3KC Educate, Empower, Employ which had sponsorship from among others, State Farm Insurance and the Army National Guard.

Since then I have been a consultant, organizer, and participant in many outdoor events, including many political rallies and drives while a member of the Thompson Democratic Town Committee.
I decided to begin this project at the urgings of English professors from around the world.

Nancy L. (Nessa) Shields
BA in Journalism, with a minor in History, University of Rhode Island
Horticultural degree from the Stockbridge School
Professional Certificate, Northeastern University

My formal education consists of grammar school in Webster MA, at St. Louis and high school in Southbridge at Marian Hill. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism with a Minor in History from the University of Rhode Island. I have an Associate Degree from The Stockbridge School of Agriculture in Landscape and Nursery Operations. Also, a Professional Certificate from Northeastern University.

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I worked in a family construction company, Frank J. Shields, Inc. My duties included, laborer, foreman, operator, project manager, bookkeeper, cost accountant, estimator and general manager.

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After that I worked in construction material supply at the Sakrete facility in Oxford, Ma. As well as customer service, I ordered supplies such as pallets and specialty products. I was the manager of large accounts. I was also safety officer and taught regular classes for all the employees.  There I was able to take Red Cross training, OSHA training and warehouse equipment operation training.

I left to take a municipal position with the Town of Charlton, MA. My first duties were largely clerical for the Sewer department, where I was the only office staff. I moved to the office of the Building Commissioner and Zoning Enforcement. 

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As well as the usual clerical duties this office required a higher level of knowledge and responsibility regarding zoning regulations, permit requirements and code enforcement. I worked with citizens and various contractors, suppliers and tradesmen to assist in preparing permit applications for successful submittal. While there three different permitting programs were introduced and used.

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I retired from The Town in 2020. Since then, I have provided temporary administrative services to the Town of Sturbridge to fill in for an employee on sick leave, with basically the same duties.

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I studied hand drumming with the late Lane Redmond, an historian, author, and world-famous drummer and teacher.

 

Since 2005, I have lead drumming circles professionally, taught drumming to people of all ages and haves brought my drums and percussion instruments to family centered community events such as farm tours, fishing derbies and family days at animal sanctuaries and parks. 

For over twenty years I have been leading plant identification and foraging classes to demonstrate the foods and other useful plants that can be found growing wild in our forests, fields and urban areas.
 

Jayakrishnan R.
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English
MMNSS College
Kerala, India

Jay is an original member of our 2007 Yahoo! Group, when he was still a student in India. He has participated vigorously in every endeavor we’ve undertaken from the beginning. He opened our India office this year and is in the process of conducting our latest worldwide cash-prize poetry contest.

He is establishing brand recognition in India by promoting our 2009 book, Blossoms of India, and by making this new contest theme, the poetry of India. He is doing all of this while teaching at the university.


Why we are:

In 2007, I joined a group of authors, scholars, and English teachers in a Yahoo! Questions and Answers group on humanities and poetry. I was a freelance writer from the age of 25 and I had taught English as a second language while living on Guam, and in the Philippines. Poetry was always a fetish of mine, and I enjoyed finding a group of teachers who could critique my work, giving me a few pointers in a genre I had read for years. My mother had a BA in English from Tennessee Wesleyan University and was a published poet and my father had an MS in Engineering from Oklahoma State University, so penmanship and grammar were heavily stressed by my parents.

After a few visits to this Yahoo! group I realized that these were real English teachers who were  complimenting, editing, and correcting works from hundreds of students, weeding out the aspiring authors from the kids who were just looking for someone to do their homework for them.

I decided to throw my hat into the ring with my shoebox full of poetry scribbled onto notebooks and bar napkins. A year later, I was the leading author and most second most sought after consultant in creative writing. At one point, Professor Christine Sukic-Kendall from the University of Reims, said that I was her favorite working American poet.

As with all things virtual, social media groups are ephemeral and ours began to splinter. That was when I started my own creative website, www.poetsofmars.com. That was the social media platform from which we created dozens of cash-prize poetry contests and published print books on their results. There were a hundred authors and two dozen teachers in that group, and we published 18 volumes of poetry.

In 2008, Professor Glenn Robert Swetman from the Biloxi, Mississippi campus of William Carey College, asked to join our group and he instantly became the center of attention. A few months later, Dr. Swetman asked me to rebuild a manuscript that had been lost during Hurricane Katrina a few years earlier. I spent several days in three different trips working with Dr. Swetman. Upon completion Dr. Swetman asked me if I would publish this newly reassembled manuscript. That book was the crowning achievement of Poets of Mars, and our publishing arm, Tangled Web Press. We now had a book by a heavy hitter in our portfolio, along with 15 other books, all based on poetry published on the internet.

The theme of the 2009 Modern Language Association was “Internet Poetry” and we were going there loaded for bear. Then, a month before the event, Dr. Swetman got sick, my editor Elaine Polin got sick, and my wife and co-producer Sheryl was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer. We didn’t make it San Francisco.

Eventually, Dt. Swetman and Mrs. Polin became well, but my wife succumbed to cancer and passed away in 2012. I had to move out of our apartment and look for someplace else to live. Mrs. Polin invited me to move into her basement apartment in her home in West Islip, New York., so I moved all my belongings and all of my office files into her beautiful home on Long Island, right on the waterfront—six months before Hurricane Sandy. When I asked FEMA and the SBA the turned down my requests for assistance, I threw in the towel. I pulled all the books except three because all of the signed contracts were somewhere in Long Island Sound.

I somehow found a second soulmate and moved to Nessa Shields’ little cottage on a farm in rural Connecticut. I had stayed active in politics and in publishing, but only as a hobby, until an original member of our core group, a teaching assistant professor in Kerala, India, experienced the horrific flooding in his area in 2018. In a matter of days, Jay and I organized a social media effort that raised thousands of dollars to buy water and food for Jay to hike up into the mountains where no aid association had yet arrived.

Since then, we have slowly gotten back into the internet poetry business. We’ve published three books and started two more cash-prize poetry contests, one on Facebook (concluded in 2019) and one just now underway, being administered from our newly established office in India.

The three of us, along with consulting from Mr. Mark Valentine and his son, Jake Valentine, have put together this plan that will put a little money in our pockets and create a well of mentoring funds and consulting services that struggling educators can draw from.  

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