| Anara Guard has studied writing at the Urban Gateways Young Writers Workshop of Chicago, Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts , Columbia College Story Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She graduated from Kenyon College and Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Her short story collection,Remedies for Hunger (2014) was named one of the Best Books of 2015 by the Chicago Book Review. Her poetry has improbably won both a John Crowe Ransom Poetry Prize and a Jack Kerouac Prize. None for Me After the crash, you must have scattered Over yards and acres, into the next county or Even somehow across state lines Because there is your ponytail Tumbling down the back of a stranger. Your eyebrow cocks on an unfamiliar face, And the shape of your shoulders is silhouetted In each lit window I pass by at night. How did all those people end up with a piece of you And me, left with none? |
Gay Guard Chamberlin is an award-winning writer, performance artist and multi-media visual artist. A graduate of Columbia College, Chicago, with a Masters in Interdisciplinary Arts, Gay is a member of Poets & Patrons, Illinois State Poets Society, TallGrass Writers Guild, Budlong Writers Group, North Center Seniors Poetry Group sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, and Women on the Verge in Kalamazoo, MI. She has taught skills as diverse as self-defense/martial arts and paper-making to both children and adults, and is a certified Interplay instructor.
The Inner Life of Words
Take heart,
for instance,
how h and t
bookend either side
of the middle
where ear resides,
a clue hidden
in plain sight to
remind us
Something is
always there,
listening,
from the heart
of the heart.
