Canton, Ohio native Paul Zimmer’s award-winning book for 2008 is Crossing to Sunlight Revisited. It contains 50 early poems and 23 new ones for a total of 73, “one for each of the years I have lived,” says Zimmer, a self-described “old poet.” Not aging or older, but old. “It is time,” he says, “to begin measuring things up for sure.”

He has been praised by the late Susan Sontag for his playfulness and by the poet James Tate for “Zimmer wisdom and Zimmer honestly and Zimmer humor.” In the introduction to Crossing to Sunlight Revisited, Zimmer says of himself, “Perhaps it is the only courageous thing I have done in my life, but I remained dogged about poetry.”

Paul spent over 40 years in the book business and is now retired, residing in Wisconsin and in the south of France. He has received many honors for his work including two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Outstanding Book Award from the Minnesota Library Association in 2003. He has published over 250 poems in various periodicals, and has given over 200 readings and lectures in colleges, universities, and poetry centers across the country.

Paul won the 2005 Ohioana Book Award in the Category of Nonfiction for Trains in the Distance published by Kent State University Press, a memoir praised by Robert Olen Butler and Annie Dillard.