Honoring Those Whom We Have Lost

This 2025 Memorial Day has affected many who have lost loved ones. Here at Gival Press we sadly have lost Cliff Bernier and John Domini in 2025. Sadly, we have also lost Peter Leach and Ellis Avery.

To their families and friends, we send our deepest condolences.

Robhainer

Bouquet with white funeral flowers

© by Robhainer.

Rest In Peace:

Clifford (Cliff) Bernier

Clifford Bernier is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Earth Suite, The Montserrat Review’s Best Chapbook Summer 2010 and recently nominated for a Library of Virginia award, and Dark Berries, one of The Montserrat Review’s Best Books for Spring Reading 2010. In January 2010 he appeared on the National Public Radio show “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.” He has published in the Potomac Review, The Baltimore Review, the online journals Notjustair and Innisfree, and elsewhere, and is featured on a CD of poetry duets, Poetry in Black and White, as well as on two jazzpoetry CDs, Live at IOTA Club and Cafe and Live at Bistro Europa. He is anthologized in the anthology Ars Poetica. Bernier was featured in readings in San Francisco, Seattle, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he was a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Writer's Center. He was founder and former host of the Washington, DC-area poetry reading series, Poesis. He was a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts' Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award.

John Domini

John Domini received a major 2008 grant from the Iowa Arts Council for his writing and accepted a visiting position in Creative Writing at Grinnell College. He work has been published fiction in Paris Review, Ploughshares, Threepeny Review, and anthologies. His second collection, Highway Trade, was praised by Alan Cheuse, of NPR's "All Things Considered," as "the way we live now... witty, biting portraits." His first novel, Talking Heads: 77, was praised by the Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler as "both cutting-edge innovative and splendidly readable... a flat-out delight." Italian publications of his work is arranged through Tullio Pironti Editore, also the first Italian house to translate Don DeLillo. Domini also published essays and other non-fiction in GQ, the New York Times, and many other places, including Italian journals. He was a regular book reviewer with The Believer and other publications. Domini received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere. He taught across the country, was a visiting writer at Harvard, Lewis & Clark, and Northwestern, and was based in Des Moines.

Peter Leach

Peter Leach was born and grew up in St. Louis. He attended Amherst College, spent two years in the Cold War army in Germany, then studied playwriting at Yale Drama School. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Louisville and taught in the night-school at Washington University in St. Louis. His short story collection Tales of Resistance won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 1999. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, River Styx, Panache, Artful Doge, and Kansas Quarterly. One of his stories was reprinted in an O. Henry Awards and another in an NYU Press Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story The Convict's Tale won the Nebraska Review fiction prize. Leach received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

Ellis Avery

The late Ellis Avery taught creative writing at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, Lieu, and The Mid-America Poetry Review, as well as onstage at New York’s Expanded Arts Theater.