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Poets on Peace #4
My Will and Testament Is on the Desk
Sherry Chandler
Born and raised in rural northern Kentucky, I first learned to speak poetry from the lips of my farmer grandfathers. Good talk and laughter were as important as hard work during long days in the tobacco fields.
I was educated at Georgetown College and the University of Kentucky and have studied writing with Jane Gentry Vance and James Baker Hall. I am a founding member of the poetry group Mosaic.
Awards include the Legacies Prize from the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, the Betty Gabehart Award for poetry from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, and a professional development grant from the Kentucky Arts Council.
Works have appeared in Limestone, The Louisville Review, Free Lunch, Parting Gifts, CQ, Vmagazine, Pegasus, Stovepipe, The Blind Man's Rainbow, Licking River Review, The Long Story.
From the book:
STORM FRONT
The heavy wind
that drives the rain today,
that whips
the crowns of trees
to witches' hair,
was yesterday a
hurricane in the Gulf,
tomorrow will be still,
the clay
returned to dust.
Hand-stitched chapbook.
Seven Dollars.
TO ORDER My Will and Testament Is on the Desk ON-LINE
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Poets on Peace #5
Gathering the Broken Pieces
Helen Losse
Helen Losse is a writer and poet, who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she is employed as a Book Reviewer for the Winston-Salem Journal. Born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, she was educated at Missouri Southern State University and Wake Forest University. She has taught middle and high school English, served as a Visiting Poet at Speas Elementary School, written an opinion column concerning racial issues for the Winston-Salem Chronicle, and published an essay, "Dispelling the Myth: The Experiences of Female Slaves" in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. She has been married to Bill for thirty-four years and has two sons.
Her poems have appeared in GFWoman, Sanskrit, Domicile, Independence Boulevard, The Lone Wolf Review, Black Bear Review, Rearview Quarterly, Tacenda, and Blink: A Little Little Magazine of Little Poems and on the websites of Wired Art From Wired Hearts, Window on Wake Forest, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, ShoeBox Diaries, Spish, Poets Against the War, and The Bohemian Rag. She has also had poems in three anthologies in England and won a Gold Circle in Open Poetry Award at Columbia University. In her poetry, she combines her interests in creative writing and African American history with emphasis on equality, justice, and a quest for peace. Following the publication of this manuscript, she plans to begin converting her thesis on Martin Luther King, Jr. into a book.
From the Book:
Gathering the Broken Pieces
Life flows free in that place
where droplets glisten, where
mean-spirited clouds
released their rains.
Dampened pigmentation
fingers a part I cannot touch,
soaking deep to the very root, tenderly,
anointing a once-slavish soul.
After the surrender, life:
a gathering of broken pieces.
Stillness? Is that the home
from which I dare not wander?
Today-light, and the spattering
of a wet fern:
in that place I will bask,
though not yet fully yielded,
radiant, in the spring of
life's possibility.
Hand-stitched chapbook.
Seven Dollars.
TO ORDER Gathering the Broken Pieces ON-LINE
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