Illinois Authors

Broadstone Books BERKELEY : 2023

In his first full-length poetry collection, Rodd Whelpley finds worlds of memory and imagination in his backyard. The poems in Blood Moon, Backyard Mountain explore the familiar, backyard geographies of the tiny: birds, June bugs, creeping Charlie, desiccated leaves, old dogs that must constantly be walked. They also map the expansive territories of the imagination and the past--the places where family and friends have died, the yearnings for love with more depth, for life with more living. They are at once personal and universal, private and inviting.

PublishAmerica, Baltimore : ©2003.

Police Captain Doug Ebersole knew the victim. Marni Lewis was an intern at the Secretary of State's office and the stepdaughter of former police chief and current state Senator, Tom Crosley. But to solve Marni's case, Ebersole will need to resolve the twenty-year-old mysteries surrounding the death of Crosley's other daughter, Jessica. The investigation will take him to a ramshackle boys club, to the Senate floor, to a convalescent home in Ohio, and to an after-hours Goth party at a skateboard center. Along the way, he'll uncover a pattern of corruption that reaches to the highest levels of Illinois government. And why not? In Springfield, Illinois, everything is political - even a dead body.

Poetry collection. The Last Bridge Is Home resonates with familial love and compassion of place. Rodd Whelpley dives into what is often unsaid but still heard, through music, through undertones of conversation. He builds for us a bridge to tandem our love and grief, what we remember and how we move forward. This collection is a testament to inevitable change, moments when “you look down, unsure the water will still be there” and find your strength. Whelpley holds out a hand and offers us an intimate lens of late 1970s Ohio, of family, and ultimately of how our relationships sustain us. —Madeleine Corley, Managing Editor, Barren Magazine In The Last Bridge Is Home, Rodd Whelpley gives us an intimate portrait of changing and complicated family relationships: how they bubble up, transform us, and never fully leave us. The poems dance in and out of childhood, adult, and familial fears and pains, tracing a life in a way that shows just how present memory, forgetting, and loss can be. —Bess Cooley, Winner of the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, Co-Founder and Editor of Peatsmoke The beauty of Rodd Whelpley’s writing makes me want to sit with his poems. Their resonance makes me want to understand why they touch me. Their brevity fools me into thinking that they are simple, and then I embark on an experience that becomes more layered with each read. For Whelpley, it is in our nature to cling, to grieve, and, for whatever reason, we resist the calm. Our world is both immediate and distant. We drift and we land. We commune, and then we are other. We perceive both beauty and fury and remain powerless in the face of each. —Ariana D. Den Bleyker, Publisher, ELJ Editions, Ltd.