Lana Hechtman Ayers

The Poetry Box LIVE – May Edition!

Saturday, May 13, 2023 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

[3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)]

 

Featured Poets:

• Susan Johnson (Washington) – author of The Call Home
• Lana Hechtman Ayers (Oregon) – author of When All Else Fails
• Joel Savishinsky (Washington) – author of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts

 

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

 

About the Featured Poets

Susan Johnson writes in the mountain town of Roslyn, Washington, where she has lived with her husband and their children for over forty years. She hikes daily with family and friends on trails along the Cle Elum River Valley. As a spokeswoman for a Roslyn citizens’ group, she worked with others to promote sustainable forestry and to protect wildlife habitat. Susan taught in the local schools and university and held leadership roles in state and national writing initiatives. She was named the 2009 Washington State Teacher of the Year.

Susan is grateful to be active in a vibrant poetry community. Her work has appeared in Cirque Journal: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, Earth’s Daughters, Poetic Shelters, Poets Unite! LiTFUSE @10 Anthology, Raven Chronicles, Rise Up Review, The Shrub-Steppe Poetry Journal, WA129+, Washington Poetic Routes, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, and Yakima Coffeehouse Poets.

You can order Susan’s new chapbook HERE

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Lana Hechtman Ayers, originally from New York, settled in the Pacific Northwest after a decade in New England. She is managing editor of three poetry presses: Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. She facilitates generative writing workshops in the Amherst Method, runs a poetry book club, helps other poets assemble manuscripts, and teaches at writer’s conferences.

Lana holds MFAs in Poetry and Writing Popular Fiction and is a Hedgebrook residency alumna. A Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and National Book Award nominee, she won honors in the Discovery / Nation Award and in the Rita Dove Poetry Prize.

Author of nine previous collections of poems, she also published a romantic time travel adventure novel, Time Flash: Another Me, and is writing a sequel. A murder mystery may also be in the works.

In addition to thriving in the book-loving culture, Lana enjoys the Oregon Coast’s bountiful rain and copious coffee shops. She lives with her marvelous husband and several sweet black & white fur babies. A time travel enthusiast, she enjoys cryptograms, and watches entirely too much Home & Garden television. Her favorite color is the swirl of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.

You can order Lana’s new book HERE

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When Joel Savishinsky published the first poem from this collection at age 40, he was a young anthropologist and gerontologist who never thought he’d grow old. Four decades later, now a grandfather and family elder, he smiles at his earlier lack of imagination. For half a century, his research and teaching have taken him to live with elders in Arctic Canada, the Caribbean, a working-class borough in North London, South Indian villages, and American retirement communities and geriatric facilities, places where he has come to love the grit, humor, passion, outrage, and honest perplexity of older people.

He is the author of The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s Richard Kalish Award (book-of-the-year prize). Since retiring, he has been transforming his experiences with the aging into poetry, short fiction and essays. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in American Writers Review, Blood and Thunder, Cirque, The Examined Life Journal, The New York Times, The Poeming Pigeon, Soul-Lit, and Windfall. He and his wife Susan live in Seattle, doing community and political work, while also helping to raise five grandchildren. A recovering academic and unrepentant activist, this is his first collection of poetry.

You can order Joel’s new chapbook HERE