Karen Schubert
I love light - the way it changes what we see. In rain, colors are richer; in winter, the light seems to come right from the horizon, illuminating what's hidden by summer exuberance. I love the light of stars, crystal reflection of snow, and the pink morning. We have so many metaphors for light; when something is "seen in a different light," we are turning it in our minds to new awarenesses. On these dark days of northeast Ohio, I miss the open sky of Wisconsin, Texas and Arizona, all that light.
Karen Schubert is the author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing), Dear Youngstown (Night Ballet Press), Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press), I Left My Wings on a Chair, a Wick Poetry Center chapbook winner (Kent State Press), Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus Press) and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House Publications). Her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including National Poetry Review, Diode Poetry Journal, DMQ Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Louisville Review, Apple Valley Review, Water~Stone Review, AGNI Online, Aeolian Harp, Best American Poetry blog and American Literary Review. Her awards include the William Dickey Memorial Broadside Award, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in poetry, and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts and is co-founding director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts nonprofit with programs for writers, readers and all who love a good story.
"In her first full-length collection, Karen Schubert works “Elbows deep in compost,” sifting through that which accumulates with the passage of time, the fecund and dangerous accumulations of a life: memory, regret, joy, and loss. Schubert’s fertile reflections by turns witness, correct, and renew the past, her patient gaze transforming both observer and observed. This collection runs through the events of a life like the Ohio River runs through Schubert’s native terrain, and like that river “it will arrive / with more than when it started.”
Kimberly Johnson
author of Uncommon Prayer