Holly Wren Spaulding grew up on a rural homestead not far from Lake Michigan, surrounded by wildflowers, trees, and books. Living so far off the grid, she developed an early affinity for letter writing, which served as a primary inspiration for this collection. Holly has lived and studied in Germany and Ireland, contributed to independent film projects in the Zapatista Autonomous Zone in Chiapas, and in communities of struggle across South Africa and Lesotho. She has worked as a childcare provider, farmhand, bookseller, editor, day laborer, recycler, screen printer, and in too many restaurants to count. Teaching college creative writing was her favorite job, until she founded Poetry Forge, where she hosts workshops and a manuscript incubator, and works with writers from across the United States and Europe.
An award winning poet, Holly has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net awards, and her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness,The Ecologist, and in Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2018), and We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2006). Previous poetry collections include Familiars (2020), If August (2017) and Pilgrim (2014), all from Alice Greene & Company. In 2021, St. Brigid Press brought out a special edition of her chapbook Fire. The Grass Impossibly (MWCP, 2008) received the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Award for Poetry. She lives on the southern seacoast of Maine with her husband, the author Matt Rigney.
Learn more about her poetry chapbooks with Alice Greene & Co.
or visit Holly’s website.