Editor-in-Chief

Mary Ann Buddenberg Miller is professor of English at Caldwell University in Caldwell, NJ.  She is editor of St. Peter's B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria Press, 2014), a collection of over 100 poems, written by 70 poets from across the USA and the Fall 2019 selection by America magazine’s The Catholic Book Club.  She guest-edited the fall 2015 issue of the women’s literary journal, Adanna, which is a specially-themed issue devoted to “women and spirituality.”  She frequently teaches an Introduction to Poetry course, in which she offers her students the opportunity to host public readings for local, published poets.  She also teaches freshman writing, British Literature, Literature of the Victorian Age, Modern Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, and Catholic Writers, a core elective in an interdisciplinary cluster, and has created a class on journal editing to engage interested students in the process of reading submissions to Presence.

Finding a poem is not like finding a novel or a play. A poem by its very nature is illusive, brief, hidden in the vast field of human words. My hope for this journal is to provide a locus for poems readers might not otherwise find and, in so doing, help us, as Yeats says about the purpose of rhythm, to “prolong the moment of contemplation,” or at least be able to return to it again and again.