Fiction Writer, Poet, Playwright, Educator, Memoir Writer and Literary Critic
Dear Friends, Old Northwest Review published two of my poems, “Inheritance (For Oma)” and “Policing My Apartment,” in its fall 2015 issue. This journal focuses on literature from the Midwest. I read the first poem at my grandmother’s funeral in…
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I have watched parts of the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the last two years. While I admire the young people who compete, I see many problems with the format and assumptions behind this contest.
Motivated by her concern after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, Kathryn Erskine wrote mockingbird (mok′ ing-bûrd) to examine how families cope after a sudden tragedy. Erksine’s first-person narrator is a ten-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome named Caitlin Ann Smith. …
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