Rosa Maria DelVecchio lives in Brooklyn, Ohio, and makes her living as a law school administrative secretary at Cleveland State University, where she wrote a master’s thesis on Chaucer in 1984.  She wrote a dissertation on Edgar Allan Poe and received a Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University in 1993. Formerly a freshman English teacher at her alma maters, DelVecchio has had poetry published in several creative writing journals and magazines since 1987, and some of her more recent poems are forthcoming in FreeXpression Magazine in Australia .  She received first prize in a quarterly poetry contest in 1989 by Wide Open Press in Santa Rosa , California. Under the pseudonym Alexander Lambros, DelVecchio received a top ten quarterly Award for Excellence in 1992 from the Bay Area Poets Coalition in Berkeley , California. The winning poems, “First Love Poem” and “Be My Wife” respectively, are included in this collection.