I’ve been a closet poet ever since high school. I’ve published a few poems, mostly over the last five years, but it wasn’t until a friend suggested I think about selecting and publishing a collection of my poems that I took these seriously enough to do something.
In spite of my life long love of poetry and my graduate training, my professional interests have always leaned toward the more practical—toward social change—and those are reflected in the books I’ve published to date:
- pulling together what I learned teaching adults in a community college that opened after the Newark riots, one of only two in the country to offer open-door admissions;
- putting my love of Adrienne Rich and her “dream of a common language” to work in organizing and editing A Women’s Thesaurus from 1982–1987; and
- synthesizing what we’d learned from organizing and ground breaking research into sector and organizational culture in our MIT philanthropy book.
I still have one more book in me, The Power of Naming, which will come out in 2025, but that’s more of a quasi memoir and collection of some previously published essays and introductions I’m proud of. So in the meantime, I’m putting this poetry out there to see where it lands. Gulp.