My poem “Lammas” will be out in the collection Milagros, published by the Patrick Heath Public Library in Boerne Texas. Lammas is celebrated on August 1 & was always a magical day when I was a kid out in the woods with my horse in the summer in Western North Carolina.
First of all, let me tell you have wonderful the Darkwater Womxn in Music Festival is. Hosted by UNC-Pembroke and led by the inimitable Sarah Busman, it is the most welcoming, most encouraging, most positive, most affirming conference I have ever attended. The 2020 conferences was the last conference I went to before Covid-19 shut everything down, and I have such good memories of it. I met all kinds of excellent and interesting performers and composers and scholars–all of them really, truly invested in making the entire world of music a better place for women. I heard fantastic papers. I heard gorgeous premieres. I got to have lunch with really cool people who did diverse things in music. I’m currently working on a collaboration with a composer I met at the festival, Jessi Harvey. I really cannot praise it enough, so if you get an opportunity to participate in it, do it.
This year’s conference will include a video recital for virtual presentation by the fantastic Lisa Neher, someone I am so lucky to have as a collaborator and friend. She’ll be performing works by herself and me as well as other fabulous composers. You are not going to want to miss a moment of this! Here’s Lisa’s line-up:
| Title | Length | Composer |
| Sick Cycle | 2:00 | Monica Chew |
| Alone | 5:30 | Catalina von Wrangell |
| Something About Isolation | 1:40 | Kimberly R. Osberg |
| Now Available | 7:00 | Lisa Neher |
| Stillness | 1:40 | Drew Swatosh |
| dark water, air stirs | 5:00 | Nicole Murphy |
| Strawberry Man | 2:00 | Lisa Neher |
I’ll have more details as the schedule develops. In the meanwhile, a big thank you to the Darkwater Womxn in Music Festival!
I’m delighted that my essay “Recognizing the Truth of ‘Craft’,” will be published in the Summer 2021 issue of The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching. This is a very personal essay about my process and development as an instructor of creative writing at Writespace Houston, where I’ve led a number of courses and workshops. I’ll link to the essay here when it’s out.
