Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.
Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.
Jeanne Yu: “I write to make sense of life in this world … and to make sure I am paying attention to the little things that matter as well as the big things, because I have come to know they are all connected. I’m an engineer, mom, and environmentalist, every day trying my best—some days are harder than others—to live from a place of my hope for the world.”
Kerrin McCadden: “I really like water, and birds—especially the Winooski River and swallows. I like to be the one who starts applause. I have recently learned to love olives. I love dailiness, hydrangea, old words and incongruous things, including a poodle. I write poems because they let me have everything I want, and words are better than yarn. Syntax, diction: knit, purl. And because a poem is an impossible thing, unlike a sweater. My evil twin is likely in one of my classes, and so I teach.” (web)
L. Renée: “I am a collector of my family’s stories. Sometimes, we gather for oral history interviews and I am prepared with an audio recorder and a listening ear. Other times, we’re just having conversations around the dinner table or on the phone and somebody says, ‘Well don’t you remember when …’ and my hand reaches for a pen. On this occasion, my aunt was telling me and Mom about the time she tried to burn her school shoes on an old coal stove in West Virginia, where my granddaddy labored as a coal miner for 43 years before ultimately dying of black lung disease. After she shared this story, I kept hearing a little girl’s voice. She was a witness to my aunt’s attempted destruction of those shoes and I wrote down what she told me exactly the way I heard her tell it—dialect, diction, and all. This was a challenge—to honor this character’s authentic voice and allow her to tell her version of the narrative, but to take care that her voice was not misunderstood as caricature by readers. I spelled some words the way I heard them to celebrate the embedded music in her speech. Here, again, I tried to emphasize the multiple meanings of the tongue: the shoe’s tongue, the sister reaching toward an ‘expensive’ word like ‘redeemed’ (which comes with an implied cost), and the speaker’s own tongue in sharing this story. I am a believer in the power of storytelling and the ways in which Black folk have passed down knowledge, experience, and wisdom through the spoken word. When I write, I know I am not writing alone. I know all my ancestors, Black Appalachians who called dirt and mountains home, are with me.” (web)
Michael Meyerhofer: “I have no idea how to describe what it’s like to see your own step-brother lying dead on TV—the same shy, good-natured guy I first met a few years ago on a family trip to Las Vegas (he was excited because he’d never been on a plane before), and who was looking forward to getting his life back together after making some mistakes when he was younger. But this poem mostly ended up being about my step-mom, who actually went back to work the day after it happened—partially because she couldn’t bear the silence and grief at home (this is also only a few months after my biological brother lost his battle against leukemia), and partly because this is America, and like it or not, there are always bills to pay.” (web)
Andrea Hollander: “During the wars that have occurred in my lifetime, I have found myself dwelling on my father’s wartime experiences in France, where he served in the surgical unit of an American army field hospital. After the war, my mother, who had not seen him for more than two years, joined him, and that’s when (and where) I was conceived. I credit Dad, who was a lover of poetry, for my own passion for it.” (web)
