Helen Vitoria is an award winning poet and an artist living in Pennsylvania.  Her poems and photographs appear widely online and in print.  She is the author of nine poetry chapbooks, a poetry pamphlet, a full length poetry collection and a collaborative ekphrastic poetry/photography collection. Her poems have been nominated thrice for Best New Poets & several Pushcart Prizes.  

Corn Exchange, her first full length collection of poetry has won the 2014 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) SILVER MEDAL for Poetry, the 2014 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Book Award, in addition to having placed as a finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award & the 2014 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, and recently been nominated for the 2015 Tufts Discovery Award.

Here is what the Hoffer Award judges had to say to the US Review of Books:

Corn Exchange, Helen Vitoria, Wild Chestnut Press - Invoking Anne Sexton's brand of highly personal, confessional verse, Vitoria's tragically intimate collection fearlessly attempts to reconcile ideas such as fear, suicide, family, commitment, pornography, memory, and experience through the binary elements of sight and touch. Vitoria shows a clear understanding of the safety existing in the eyes, in the act of seeing and observing, and in its inherent physical distance that the hands cannot and do not carry. Not until there exists a trust able to reconcile that physical distance and, as Vitoria explains, "spread the body, [using] thumb and palm and say: here, be happy."

Corn Exchange has been taught in MFA courses in Umbria, Italy, and her poem, We Were Horses, taught in various Creative Writing MFA classes throughout the US. 

She is the Founding Editor & Editor in Chief of  the award winning, Thrush Poetry Journal  & Thrush Press.  She also  served as a Poetry Editor for Poets & Artists Magazine.  She teaches a free monthly poetry  workshop in her community and will be teaching poetry to inmates in Pennsylvania Corrections  Facilities.  She is working on her second full length collection of poetry, NEBRASKA. Visit her   listing on Poets & Writers here.

---