The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho

As Julie R. Enszer writes in her review of The Islands Project, Eloise Klein Healy’s fifth book of poetry, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (Arktoi Press), is the sort of book that lesbians pass to one another saying, urgently, 'Here, you must read this.' The poems of The Islands Project are important for the stories that they tell and for the history that they explore."

And so Woman-Stirred Radio, is thrilled to host Eloise Klein Healy Thursday June 7th.

Eloise Klein Healy's work speaks volumes for the intensity and lucid images of one of Queer culture's most beloved source of inspiration and imagination. The interstices of lesbian present and imagined lesbian past fold into each other:

It's a complicated embodiment
I'm after. Meaning. Snapshots from my life
need to be arranged on pages
and linked in a timeline
like papyrus chips
put back in order.

Eloise Klein Healy was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of five books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. Her most recent collection, Passing (Red Hen Press), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize. Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books) was also a finalist for the Lambda Book Award. Women’s Studies Chronicles, a chapbook from The Inevitable Press, appeared in 1998. Ordinary Wisdom, from Paradise Press, was reprinted by Red Hen Press in 2005. Healy was awarded the Horace Mann Award by Antioch University Los Angeles for her contributions to the arts and simultaneously was named Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.

Ms. Healy’s work has been widely anthologized in collections such as Another City: Writing From Los Angeles; California Poetry: From The Gold Rush To The Present; Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond; The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; and The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave. She has been awarded artist’s residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony and was Guest Writer at Ohio University in 2004. Healy was also the recipient of a COLA Fellowship from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles and a California Arts Council Grant.

So please join Merry Gangemi and Eloise Klein-Healy for a conversation about her new book The Islands Project with . Tune in to WGDR 91.1fm or stream online at www.wgdr.org.

Woman-Stirred Radio is a collective of writers whose work and lives thrive on the creative space of writing.