Robert Perchan • Overdressed to Kill

• The Weldon Kees Award 2005 •

About the Author:

Robert Perchan was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up there. Educated after a fashion at Duke and Ohio Universities, he taught for the U.S. Navy’s Program for Afloat College Education (PACE) on ships deployed in Rota, Spain, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Western Pacific Ocean before moving, in his words, "onward and awkward." His poems, stories and essays have appeared in scores of literary journals in the USA and abroad, and a number of them have been included in anthologies published by Dell, Black Sparrow, City Lights and Global City Press. In 1991, Watermark Press (Wichita) brought out his prose poem novella Perchan’s Chorea: Eros and Exile, which was translated into French and published by Quidam Editeur (Meudon) in 2002. His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published in book form in 2000. Most recently, his poetry chapbooks Mythic Instinct Afternoon and Overdressed to Kill won the 2005 Poetry West Chapbook Prize (Poetry West, Colorado Springs) and the 2005 Weldon Kees Award (Backwaters Press, Omaha), respectively. He currently resides in Pusan, South Korea. Bob's poem "Late Blooming" appeared in Entelechy's issue 6, and he won first prize in the Entelechy Biofiction Contest with his story "The Neoplastic Surgeon," which appeared in issue 7.