Navigational Hazards

Two noted Maryland authors collaborate to produce Navigational Hazards, an intense collection of photography and poetry. Elisavietta Ritchie and Donald Grady Shomette transport us to the tidewater peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. Image after image, word after word, flow from the pages: duck blinds, cemeteries, sandpipers, tides, turtles, shipwrecks, sirens. Ritchie and Shomette know the lower western shore of Maryland. They view their subject through a single lens.

OSPREY - "this fish hawk builds a scraggly nest of sticks atop the channel marker"

TIDAL QUESTIONS - "the sea is a generous grave"

ON WEATHERING GALES - "whether to rig the sea anchor from stem or from stern depends on the cut of the hull"

NAVIGATIONAL HAZARDS - "I never warned you: falling in love is not as simple as tumbling from a canoe"

Elisavietta Ritchie's fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, photojournalism, and translations from Russian, French, Malay and Indonesian have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry, American Scholar, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, National Geographic, New York Quarterly, JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, Confrontation, Press, New Letters, Kalliope, Nimrod, Canadian Woman Studies, Ann Arbor Review, Loch Raven Review, Innisfree, Broadkill Review, Beltway Poetry, ArLiJo, Calyx, and many others; anthologies including Sound & Sense; The 90th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, When I'm An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple; If I Had My Life To Live Over I Would Pick More Daisies; The Tie That Binds; If I Had A Hammer; Grow Old Along With Me / The Best Is Yet To Be; Generation To Generation; New to North America, Beyond Lament (poems on the Holocaust); September Eleven, Life On The Line: Selections on Words & Healing; The Use of Narratives in the Helping Professions: A Teacher's Casebook; and many others including several international anthologies from Lost Tower Books (England) and Prosopisia (India). In Haste I Write You This Note: Stories & Half-Stories, winner of the premiere Washington Writers' Publishing House Fiction Competition (2000), is now an ebook (2015). Raking The Snow won the Washington Writer's Publishing House poetry prize (1982). Flying Time: Stories & Half-Stories, her first short fiction collection, includes four PEN Syndicated Fiction winners. Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country won the Great Lakes Colleges Association's "New Writer's Prize for Best First Book of Poetry 1975-76." "Camille Pissarro's THE BATHER Speaks" won The Ledge 2011 poetry award; two poems won annual Poetry Society of America awards. Grants include a graduate teaching fellowship, American University; four DC Commission for the Arts grants; and four Virginia Center for the Creative Arts grants. Education includes: The Sorbonne, University of Paris, where she received a diploma with "Mention Très Bien" (equivalent to magna cum laude) from the Cours de Civilisation Française; Cornell University; University of California at Berkeley (combined BA in French, Russian and English); Georgetown University (Russian courses); American University (MA in French literature, minor in Russian studies); The Writer's Center; and the Toronto Martial Arts Commission.

Donald Grady Shomette completed his undergraduate work in art and art history at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. His early career as a graphic designer for the Wall Street Journal, Grolier Publishing in New York City, and the Washington Post in Washington, D.C., and as art director for several advertising agencies, and the Federal Government, earned him numerous awards in the field of visual communications. For more than two decades he served on the staff of the Library of Congress and simultaneously as director of Nautical Archaeological Associates, Inc., a non-profit research organization, which conducted among others endeavors the first underwater archaeological surveys in the states of Maryland, New Jersey, and Arkansas. As a historian Shomette has served as a cultural resources management consultant for numerous states, various agencies of the U.S. Government, museums, universities, and non-profit research establishments. As a marine archaeologist he has worked in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain under the sponsorship of such institutions as the National Geographic Society, the National Park Service, the U.S. Navy, and various educational foundations and museums. He is currently CEO of Cultural Resources Management. Shomette is the author of seventeen books, the most recent being Privateers of the Revolution: War on the New Jersey Coast, 1775-1783, published in July 2016 by Schiffer Publishing. His newest book, Anaconda's Tail: The Civil War on the Potomac Frontier 1861-1865, appeared in Fall 2019. He is a contributor to three international encyclopedias and two anthologies of history. His many scientific and popular articles have appeared in such publications as National Geographic Magazine, History and Technology, American Neptune and Sea History. He has appeared in documentaries on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Maryland Public Television, NBC, CBS, and the BBC. For more than a dozen years he served as a lecturer for the Smithsonian Journeys Program in the Great Lakes and along the entirety of the North Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. Thrice winner of the prestigious John Lyman Book Award for Best American Maritime History, and once winner of the Marion V. Brewington Book award for Naval Literature, Shomette was also honored with the Calvert Prize, the highest award in Maryland for historic preservation. In 1997 he was awarded an Honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters by the University of Baltimore for his contributions to the arts, science, and literature. His most recent endeavors have taken him into the field of historic cartography for the National Geographic Society, and into recorded sound and music as lyricist and music producer for Millstone Landing Productions.