Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, co-edited with Grace Bauer (Xavier Review Press, 2006) One of three finalists for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award in Poetry “Everette Maddox made a vivid impression on me the few times I met him, because he struck me as someone who had been given the job of a sweet clown guarding a strange intersection of time and place. The Maple Leaf Bar poetry scene in New Orleans at the near-end of the 20th century was as temporary as place and time get. Everette was the perfect master of ceremonies over a dying dance that took a few happy, booze-soaked years to play out . . . . The South, New Orleans, decay, poetry, wit, crippling nostalgia, and carpe diem—all of these things wafted off Everette like the smell of whiskey and cigarettes . . . . He died with—one might even say ‘for’—his place and time, and this book is a loving memorial to Everette and to all that.” -- Andrei Codrescu “Grace Bauer and Julie Kane have done an admirable job of assembling this testament to Everette’s life and writing, and may their efforts serve to introduce his work to the wider audience it deserves. Heretofore, Everette was the kind of poet whom, if you weren’t in New Orleans, you heard about only from those who were. Well, they are all here now and ready to tell you his story.” -- R. S. Gwynn “Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum, edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane, is New Orleans’ tribute to the poet that countless people loved and let visit, but would never let stay too long for fear that his world would swamp theirs. Practically every writer who lives in or once lived in New Orleans and had any contact at all with Everette Hawthorne Maddox has contributed something to the volume that is a ‘loving memorial’ to him . . . . [it] should make many more people aware of his talent and his influence on others.” -- Mary McCay, The New Orleans Times-Picayune “In all, this compilation is a fascinating way of portraying Everette Maddox through the eyes of his friends, students, and loved ones. It also serves as an impression of the Carrollton milieu . . . that revolved around Oak Street in the late 1970s into the 1980s. Hopefully, publication of Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum will allow more people to know of and share in at least the poetry of Everette Maddox.” -- David Kunian, Offbeat Magazine “That [Everette] was talented we knew, that he was probably doomed we suspected, but who could have guessed that he would go on to become inseparable from the New Orleans poetry scene and win a group of fervent admirers—a number of them writers of consequence themselves—who would not let him go obscurely into that good night. It is they who have produced this distinctly eclectic and elegiac miscellany, 318 pages of essays, poems, fiction, and journalism focused on the Laureate of the Maple Leaf Bar.” -- Dwight Eddins in Alabama Writers’ Forum