Rick Lupert has been involved with L.A. poetry since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award and was a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets for 2 years. He created the Poetry Super Highway ( http://poetrysuperhighway.com/ ) and hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading for almost 21 years. His first spoken word album "Rick Lupert Live and Dead" featuring 25 studio and live tracks was released in March, 2016. He’s authored 20 collections of poetry, including “Donut Famine”, "Professor Clown on Parade", "Romancing the Blarney Stone", “Making Love to the 50 Foot Woman”, “The Gettysburg Undress” (Rothco Press) and “Nothing in New England is New”, and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah” and the noir anthology “The Night Goes on All Night.He also writes and draws (with Brendan Constantine) the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” and writes the Jewish Poetry column “From the Lupertverse” for http://www.JewishJournal.com/. He is regularly featured at venues all over the world.Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, an internet resource and weekly publication for poets. (PoetrySuperHighway.com)Currently Rick works as a music teacher at synagogues in Southern California and as a graphic and web designer for and for anyone who would like to help pay his mortgage.