A Note From Founding Director of the Center for Poetry, Anita Skeen

September 4, 2019

Announcement of a new chapbook from Finishing Line Press: Induction: Poems for my New Daughter by Colleen Alles. 

Those of you who have a connection with the old ROIAL (Residential Option in Arts and Letters Program) that existed in the College of Arts and Letters from 1996 to 2007 might be interested to know that Colleen Alles (then Colleen Farrow) has published her first collection of poems with Finishing Line Press (2018). Induction:  Poems for my New Daughter speaks to the bond between mother and daughter both before and after the child’s birth in language that is personal and universal at the same time. The images are fresh, the language inviting, and humor finds its way into many of the poems though their nature is serious. I was surprised and delighted when I turned the book to the back cover to see the blurbs. One was by Kristin Brace, a winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize for her collection, Toward the Wild Abundance. As the Series editor for Wheelbarrow Books, it pleased me to think of this writer’s triangle: Colleen, who was my student in ROIAL; Kristin, who is a Wheelbarrow Books author; and me, having a connection to both of them. I love discovering connections like this.

Sometimes the writing world, huge as it is, can seem very small.   ~ Anita Skeen