2023 Winner of Peace Corps Writers’ Award for Best Poetry Book

Ten Years A Poet

Philip Fretz
(Sierra Leone 1967–69)

2023 Best Poetry Book

I have written poems and short stories since I can remember, years before word processing freed me from the perils of my illegible handwriting. Subsequent to retiring, I discovered first the Osher Life Long Learning program in Lewes, Delaware, and then the Renaissance Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of these programs offered many opportunities to practice writing in many subject areas with encouragement from classmates and instructors. The selection of poems in this volume represent many that were spawned by participation in these programs. I’ve been awakened to notice the people I see in ordinary settings and events that occur in everyday life. They arouse my inspiration to record what I see and hear and translate those ideas into poetry and prose.

Philip Fretz has lived in Philadelphia, southern Delaware, and in Baltimore, MD. He has been an active member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, the Eastern Shore Writers Association, and the University of Delaware’s Osher Life Long Learning Institute. In Baltimore, he joined the Renaissance Institute, a division of Notre Dame University of Baltimore, Maryland. Through his participation in writers’ workshops, he has expanded his writing techniques. He has lived abroad for part of his undergraduate university training, for his service first in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, then in the U.S. Army, and for his career in Information Science for firms in Philadelphia.

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Ten Years A Poet
Philip  Fretz (Sierra Lleone 1967–69)
Independently published
83 pages
$9.50 (paperback), $5.00 (Kindle)