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Book EVENING STREET REVIEW NUMBER 39

Download or read book EVENING STREET REVIEW NUMBER 39 written by k. Barbara Bergmann and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evening Street Press is centered on Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 1848 revision of the Declaration of Independence: "that all men -- and women -- are created equal," with equal rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It recognizes that all people are created equal and focuses on the realities of experience, personal and historical, from the most gritty to the most dreamlike, including awareness of the personal and social forces that block or develop the possibilities of a new culture. Evening Street Press is no longer accepting work for publication. We will continue to vet and publish online work from incarcerated people for our DIY Prison Project. You can read all our publications at www.eveningstreetpress.com Order print copies of any of our publications from our website www.eveningstreetpress.com

Book Evening Street Review Number 21

Download or read book Evening Street Review Number 21 written by Barbara Bergmann and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evening Street Review is centered on the belief that all men and women are created equal, that they have a natural claim to certain inalienable rights, and that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With this center, and an emphasis on writing that has both clarity and depth, it practices the widest eclecticism. Evening Street Review reads submissions of poetry (free verse, formal verse, and prose poetry) and prose (short stories and creative nonfiction) year round. Submit 3-6 poems or 1-2 prose pieces at a time. Payment is one contributor's copy. Copyright reverts to author upon publication. Response time is 3-6 months. Please address submissions to Editors, 2881 Wright St, Sacramento, CA 95821-5232. Email submissions are also acceptable; send to the following address as Microsoft Word or rich text files (.rtf): [email protected] submission guidelines, subscription information, published works, and author profiles, please visit our website:www.eveningstreetpress.com.© Copyright 2019 by Evening Street Press2881 Wright StSacramento, CA 95821All rights revert to the author upon publication

Book A Long Strange Trip

Download or read book A Long Strange Trip written by Dennis McNally and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture. From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes. Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.

Book Main Street

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sinclair Lewis
  • Publisher : BoD - Books on Demand
  • Release : 2023-06-01
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 622 pages

Download or read book Main Street written by Sinclair Lewis and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which she’s exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicott’s home town. Carol, inspired by big-city ideas, soon begins chafing at the seeming quaintness and even backwardness of the townsfolk, and their conservative, self-satisfied way of life. She struggles to try to reform the town in her image, while finding meaning in the seeming cultural desert she’s found herself in and in her increasingly cold marriage. Gopher Prairie is a detailed, satirical take on small-town American life, modeled after Sauk Centre, the town in which Lewis himself grew up. The town is fully realized, with generations of inhabitants interacting in a complex web of village society. Its bitingly satirical portrayal made Main Street highly acclaimed by its contemporaries, though many thought the satirical take was perhaps a bit too dark and hopeless. The book’s celebration and condemnation of small town life make it a candidate for the title of the Great American Novel. Main Street was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but the decision was overturned by the prize’s Board of Trustees and awarded instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. When Lewis went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, he declined it—with the New York Times reporting that he did so because he was still angry at the Pulitzers for being denied the prize for Main Street. Despite the book’s snub at the Pulitzers, Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, with Main Street being cited as one of the reasons for his win.

Book What Winter Means

Download or read book What Winter Means written by Deena Linett and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Grassic Short Novel Prize 2016 What Winter Means, Deena Linett's third novel, brings five women of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities together who have won prestigious fellowships to a fictive library outside Boston. As these very different women move through time and experience, each brings her complex history to surprising events in the present. With her marvelously supple prose, and fluid, almost musical structure, Linett's richly layered descriptions of her characters give this short novel an impressive spaciousness. —K.C. Frederick, winner of the PEN/Winship Prize and five other novels A New York painter who was born in South Africa, a proper Protestant New Englander involved with a married man, a Hawaiian philosopher, a Breton architectural historian, and a Florida novelist whose son has committed a rape have won fellowships and gather to do their work at a library outside Boston. We follow the women of What Winter Means as they struggle with their work, men, children and aging. It is as if we overhear women we know, thinking, and talking to one another over a cup of tea. —Barbara Bergmann, Editor, Evening Street Press What Winter Means presents the lives of five women, scholars and artists, their vocations, loves, and friendships, with insight and sympathy in a series of rich, compassionate stories—Rose Moss, author of In Court (also in Spanish) and four other books.

Book While I Was Gone

Download or read book While I Was Gone written by Sue Miller and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "New York Times" bestseller called "quietly gripping" by "USA Today" demonstrates how impulses can fracture even the most stable family. Despite her loving family and beautiful home, Jo Becker is restless. Then an old roommate reappears, bringing back Jo's memories of her early 20s. Jo's obsession with that period in her life--and the crime that ended it--draws her back to a horrible secret.

Book Night Road

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kristin Hannah
  • Publisher : St. Martin's Press
  • Release : 2011-03-22
  • ISBN : 1429965029
  • Pages : 396 pages

Download or read book Night Road written by Kristin Hannah and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vivid, universal, and emotionally complex, Kristin Hannah's Night Road raises profound questions about motherhood, identity, love, and forgiveness. "A rich, multilayered reading experience, and an easy recommendation for book clubs." —Library Journal (starred review) Life comes down to a series of choices. To hold on... To let go...to forget...to forgive... Which road will you take? For eighteen years, Jude Farraday has put her children's needs above her own, and it shows—her twins, Mia and Zach, are bright and happy teenagers. When Lexi Baill moves into their small, close-knit community, no one is more welcoming than Jude. Lexi, a former foster child with a dark past, quickly becomes Mia's best friend. Then Zach falls in love with Lexi and the three become inseparable. Jude does everything to keep her kids out of harm's way. But senior year of high school tests them all. It's a dangerous, explosive season of drinking, driving, parties, and kids who want to let loose. And then on a hot summer's night, one bad decision is made. In the blink of an eye, the Farraday family will be torn apart and Lexi will lose everything. In the years that follow, each must face the consequences of that single night and find a way to forget...or the courage to forgive. Vivid, universal, and emotionally complex, Night Road raises profound questions about motherhood, identity, love, and forgiveness. It is a luminous, heartbreaking novel that captures both the exquisite pain of loss and the stunning power of hope. This is Kristin Hannah at her very best, telling an unforgettable story about the longing for family, the resilience of the human heart, and the courage it takes to forgive the people we love. "You cannot read Night Road and not be affected by the story and the characters. The total impact of the book will stay with you for days to come after it is finished." —The Huffington Post

Book The House on Mango Street

Download or read book The House on Mango Street written by Sandra Cisneros and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.

Book Cement Shoes

    Book Details:
  • Author : Judy Ireland
  • Publisher : Evening Street Press
  • Release : 2014-07-01
  • ISBN : 1937347206
  • Pages : 61 pages

Download or read book Cement Shoes written by Judy Ireland and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Sinclair Poetry Prize: Early in Judy Ireland’s debut collection, in “Lot’s Wife,” the speaker laments “how unfair it was/to turn her into a pillar of salt when all she was doing/was looking.” Daring to look back carries risks—whether it’s seeing an Iowa landscape where “Seven AM hog reports on the radio” become a young girl’s “cement shoes” or a father who “voted for Nixon” and whose “shame for me/was a big flashlight” nonetheless lives on “in the dim sun/of my yearning”—but so does looking at the present carry risk, for a lover may suddenly announce as if she were “someone saying, ‘I’m partial to strawberries’” that she’s “afraid of dying.” Risk is everywhere in this collection—the rewards are these wonderful poems. —Stephen Gibson, author of Rorschach Art Too, 2014 Donald Justice Prize winner Judy Ireland grew up wild with her sisters and their corn silk hair, barefoot in the dark Iowa earth. In the title poem of this beautiful collection, Cement Shoes, we hear the poet’s brother from his Harley tell her, … “your soul is different,/ your soul is full of books, / and your feet are in cement shoes.” He couldn’t be more right … cement carrying the landscape of Iowa, the land, the creeks, the earth, and the girls growing up among the rows of corn, whose “hair hung down, crazy silks among the rows; / banshees in the corn, …/. Here are lines that resonate long after reading these strong and radiant poems envisioned with an eye as clear as you might imagine an Iowa sky sees in reflection. Here is a poet grounded in her Iowa as in her poems … observant, wry and beautiful lines that weave to water’s edge, from Dry Run Creek, to New Orleans, to New York and back to Iowa … the poet tells us, “I have come so far from Iowa / only to find it in my body. / The blackest dirt on earth and I am every inch and acre of it./ bones planted deep, where no light nor rain can reach. The tall corn grows … and still my hair grows / like prairie.” This wildness pressing the edges of her lines, compels the poet’s voice in this gorgeous body of work. —Susan R. Williamson, Director, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, author of Burning After Dark, winner of the Hannah Kahn 25th Anniversary Chapbook Prize.

Book Penelope in Repose

Download or read book Penelope in Repose written by Ken Autrey and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner Helen Kay Chapbook Prize Penelope in Repose is that rare poetic feat: a series of poems which make a successful whole, a story complete and real and powerful. These poems choose the inside, to use a cliché. But these poems are never merely that: the subject, Penelope, is indeed family to the writer, someone he’s met, admired late in her life, and who now deserves, in her final absence, someone to carry on in that voice. The work is moving, dramatic, and striking in its imagery. –Robert Parham, author of The Relentlessness of Salvation

Book Out of the Dust  Scholastic Gold

Download or read book Out of the Dust Scholastic Gold written by Karen Hesse and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed author Karen Hesse's Newbery Medal-winning novel-in-verse explores the life of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo growing up in the dust bowls of Oklahoma. Out of the Dust joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ."A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands.To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. While others flee from the dust bowl, Billie Jo is left to find peace in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma -- and in the surprising landscape of her own heart.

Book All the Words

    Book Details:
  • Author : Maria Brandt
  • Publisher : Evening Street Press
  • Release : 2015-09-01
  • ISBN : 1937347273
  • Pages : 107 pages

Download or read book All the Words written by Maria Brandt and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria Brandt’s novella All the Words is an artfully constructed collage of truth and memory, a wonderfully poetic story about the traumas that bind us to ourselves and each other. The simplicity of her language juxtaposed against the deceptive safety of a familiar landscape and the complications of childhood sorrow and denial produce an effect not unlike that of being on a speeding train, the same train her main character rides with her father as they struggle to confront what they can no longer avoid. Brandt is masterful at describing the paradoxical human desire to both erase and embrace the past in order to live more fully with and in spite of it. —Cathy Smith, author of The Glory Walk The characters in Maria Brandt’s heart-wise and home-wise All the Words struggle, each in their own way, to articulate all the necessary words. For in this lyrically lush and beautifully cadenced novella about a family’s love and loss, words are, paradoxically, precious and scarce. Sentences start but sputter out; mouths go mute; memories, both allusive and elusive, tease then disappear, only to reappear as fragmented textual ghosts, italicized and erupting throughout the course of this family’s journey—a journey from trauma to understanding, and, ultimately, to a kind of acceptance. Such a story arc is easy to describe, but painstakingly difficult to render dramatically and truthfully, but Brandt pulls it off with élan and intelligence and, best of all, the instincts of a natural storyteller. Read this short novel and feel what I felt: utterly renewed. —Joseph Salvatore, author of To Assume a Pleasing Shape In Maria Brandt’s All the Words, memory fuses with the present as a young woman journeys home to Long Island to confront the secrets and stories that haunted her transition into adolescence. Jane’s lens on the past is prismatic, splintering events into shards that she gradually and suspensefully tries to reassemble, even as the characters’ lives resist mending. Brandt’s lyrical and disorienting narrative mimics the fugue-like state of children leaving childhood, mapping anew a world they once felt at home in. —Suzanne Matson, author of The Tree-Sitter

Book To Drink from a Wider Bowl

Download or read book To Drink from a Wider Bowl written by Joanne Durham and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize In her luminous collection, To Drink from a Wider Bowl, Joanne Durham asserts: “Every home/needs a map of the world.” What she has drawn for us here is nothing less than a map of how to navigate our days with honesty, grace, and a deep mindfulness that leaves nothing unnoticed. Her richly layered and musical poems bear the contours of every phase of life, and like time itself, each one “stretches like an accordion, stores lullabies, love songs and funeral chords between its folds.” This is a beautiful, timely book you’ll want to pick up again and again. —James Crews, Poet and Editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy When Joanne Durham tells us she learned from her father that “a line/is the shortest way to connect two points,/a line of poetry, two people,” she hints at one of the major themes of To Drink from a Wider Bowl: connections. In her skillfully-crafted poems, she spans decades of connections with family members—from a grandmother who played a “mean game/of crazy eights” to a son “who hums as he sorts/the silverware, noticing how each spoon shines.” She chronicles encounters with children in her classroom, with friends living and dying, with strangers she meets anywhere. And she makes those connections in a poetic voice that is wise, endearing, and compassionate. This collection will undoubtedly delight readers who thirst for poems that invite them to drink from a wider bowl of human experience. Brava! to Durham for sending such an enticing invitation. ––Carolyn Martin, Poet and Poetry Editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation From the Russian grandmother, who grew up in a mud shack and gathered cow dung to seal her windows, to the grandson, still in the womb, who “riffs off tangled strands of history,” Joanne Durham’s poems encompass it all–a life lived to the hilt and felt in every cell. She writes of love, of course, but also isolation and fear, of bravery and joy, of awe and elation. Part of the vibrancy of her poems comes from her insistence on viewing her own life in the context of the larger world. She sweeps the reader into the arc of a life that knows both vulnerability and contentment but doesn’t doubt the future is ours to shape. A triumphant collection from a woman at the peak of her gifts. —Dannye Romine Powell, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver (Press 53)

Book American Accent

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dominika Wrozynski
  • Publisher : Evening Street Press
  • Release : 2018
  • ISBN : 1937347486
  • Pages : 62 pages

Download or read book American Accent written by Dominika Wrozynski and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dominika Wrozynski’s American Accent is a gorgeous discovery of riches, personal in its moving narratives of love and loss, cosmopolitan in sensibility and range. An opening sequence that explores inherited trauma (Wrozynski’s Polish mother was maimed during WWII) is riveting, and as a whole, the volume adroitly balances the darker moments (the veteran who cannot forget the “charred bodies” he saw in Kuwait) with the wondrous (Patrick Swayze in New Mexico in a balloon!). American Accent comprises a work of lyric witness in poetry redolent with humane truths and beauty. That’s all you need to know. –Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth What makes us Americans? Dominika Wrozynski's poems say Everything! She has traveled from Poland to Seattle to New Mexico to Las Vegas to Florida, seen movie stars and felt the heat of deserts and swamps. These poems are full of wasp stings and hornets, Polish vodka, and everyday worship of the luminous ordinary and a paean to the "howling, slobbering parts" of her heart. Not only does she dive deep into her own being but she tells us what it means to live in this country with its crazy rhythms. A glorious debut. –Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey The poems in this breathtaking debut collection ricochet from the startling (the poet’s Polish mother has only one arm, “the other shot away by a German soldier / during World War II”) to the tedious (stalled cars, bad dogs, worse jobs). All of America is here, and we see it all bathed in love’s abundance, the great and the terrible celebrated equally. For it is everything—the good, the bad, the ho-hum—that gives us our lives, this poet, these marvelous poems. –David Kirby, author of Get Up, Please

Book The Idea of You

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robinne Lee
  • Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
  • Release : 2017-06-13
  • ISBN : 125012591X
  • Pages : 320 pages

Download or read book The Idea of You written by Robinne Lee and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now an original movie on Prime Video starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine! When Solène Marchand, the thirty-nine-year-old owner of a prestigious art gallery in Los Angeles, takes her daughter, Isabelle, to meet her favorite boy band, she does so reluctantly and at her ex-husband’s request. The last thing she expects is to make a connection with one of the members of the world-famous August Moon. But Hayes Campbell is clever, winning, confident, and posh, and the attraction is immediate. That he is all of twenty years old further complicates things. What begins as a series of clandestine trysts quickly evolves into a passionate relationship. It is a journey that spans continents as Solène and Hayes navigate each other’s disparate worlds: from stadium tours to international art fairs to secluded hideaways in Paris and Miami. And for Solène, it is as much a reclaiming of self, as it is a rediscovery of happiness and love. When their romance becomes a viral sensation, and both she and her daughter become the target of rabid fans and an insatiable media, Solène must face how her new status has impacted not only her life, but the lives of those closest to her.

Book The Way of Shadows

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brent Weeks
  • Publisher : Orbit
  • Release : 2008-10-01
  • ISBN : 0316040223
  • Pages : 535 pages

Download or read book The Way of Shadows written by Brent Weeks and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From NYT bestselling author Brent Weeks comes the first novel in his breakout fantasy trilogy in which a young boy trains under the city's most legendary and feared assassin, Durzo Blint. For Durzo Blint, assassination is an art -- and he is the city's most accomplished artist. For Azoth, survival is precarious. Something you never take for granted. As a guild rat, he's grown up in the slums, and learned to judge people quickly -- and to take risks. Risks like apprenticing himself to Durzo Blint. But to be accepted, Azoth must turn his back on his old life and embrace a new identity and name. As Kylar Stern, he must learn to navigate the assassins' world of dangerous politics and strange magics -- and cultivate a flair for death.

Book Oh  say did you know

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ellen Hirning Schmidt
  • Publisher : Evening Street Press
  • Release : 2020-05-01
  • ISBN : 1937347583
  • Pages : 44 pages

Download or read book Oh say did you know written by Ellen Hirning Schmidt and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Helen Kay Chapbook Prize 2019 Author bio: I teach writing in Ithaca, NY, summer workshops at Star Island, NH, and workshops each semester at Cornell University. After retiring from work in a crisis center in 2006, I felt like a cartoon character walking off a cliff into thin air without a plan. But within a few months, I designed Writing through the Rough Spots, a course enabling participants to create clarity about challenging life situations. My students, 18–85 years old, range widely—athlete, author, chaplain, ex-felon, hairdresser, musician, physician, prison guard, restaurant server, scientist, therapist… and come from across the US and 15 countries. The midwifery of writing makes teaching a non-stop thrill for me. I’ve written poems for most of my life, but only became interested in sharing them publicly when I turned 70. Less than two years later my poems appeared in 2018 Passager Poetry Contest, #65, The Avocet, Poetry Quarterly, Caesura, and The Healing Muse. My experience as a manuscript editor has been primarily with memoir, poetry, fiction and YA fiction. www. WritingRoomWorkshops.com The poems in Oh say did you know reflect on the exterior world, the political, environmental and civil landscapes surrounding us all, as well as on the navigation of the interior. My poems traverse where the two meet. Keen observations from the natural world provide metaphors for these parallel terrains. My poems juxtapose the impact of loss with gratitude for what we keep. The cycles of nature offer sturdy and stirring metaphors. Observations of daily life as well as imaginings are gleaned from growing wisdom that comes with age combined with a fresh outlook. I hope my poems will nurture other’s spirits as writing them has nurtured mine. What others are saying: Ellen Schmidt has that rare ability to make her personal voice express the universal experiences in all of our lives. She takes the seemingly mundane world of our relationships with family, friends and nature and finds, in them, the insights that allow the reader to question and appreciate what had once been taken for granted. –Joel Savishinsky, Author of Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, winner of the Gerontological Society of America's book of the year prize. These poems peek at doom and dance with delight, always shining with Ellen’s hope, gratefulness and big heart. She infuses some humor, helping to make this a warming brew. What we drink from her poems is enriching and enjoyable. –Barbara Lydecker Crane, author of Zero Gravitas, Alphabetricks, and BackWords Logic With great wisdom and humanity, Ellen Schmidt gives us poems that teach and celebrate and mourn and encourage. Unafraid of the dark in these fearful times, she is "armed to the teeth with Hope." I feel lucky to be among her readers, taken care of within her poems – "oases of kindness [where] reason's tender shoots can burst forth." –Mary Azrael poet and editor of Passager Books