Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty-year writer and the author of 11 published books of fiction and poetry and 5 stage plays. She has been nominated 21 times for the Pushcart Prize in both fiction and poetry. Her play THE CROOKED HEART concerning artist Jackson Pollock premiered on October 25, 2022 at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. Adapted from an earlier novel, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Another play, LADY IN A POST BOX, co-written with poet and writer Ciaran O’Driscoll, will also premiere in a staged-reading this year, again at The Irish Rep. Her satirical Novel OFFICE was re-printed as a Second Edition. A new Novel will be out in the winter. Susan Isla is a Brand Ambassador for The Galway Review.
http://www.susantepper.com
Before Dark
Constant on the crooked stairs
the ups and downs
all day
people, dogs, deliveries,
skirmishes
people I don’t know;
all while I lie here on the bed.
But I do know the hour
before dark
through slits in the blinds
when the last of the sun
passes the skylight’s
taped over cracks,
before settling into
the ground for its rest.
Soon after, the thumping
taking the stairs up
two at a time
Your key rattling the lock;
calling out of my name.
Today I have kept
the chain fastened.
Your songs of worry
have beat my brains out.
Jamie Cat Callan is known for her French lifestyle books, mostly recently, Parisian Charm School from Penguin Random House. She is also the creator of The Writers Toolbox from Chronicle Books.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, American Letters & Commentary, Story, Sun Magazine and The Missouri Review. She is a recipient of grants from the New York Council on the Arts, the Pen American Center, The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. She has been awarded residency fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, Dorland Mountain Artists Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Arts (in Virginia, as well as international residencies in France and Germany).
She has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, New York University, U.C.L.A., the Low Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, Fairfield University and she served as a teaching fellow at Yale University.
Jamie received lives in New York’s Hudson Valley on a small working farm with her husband, William G. Thompson, a retired Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist.
Jamie is also an avid photographer. Her first published photographs came out in The Bardian in 1974.
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