January 2023

Join us as we welcome Katie Sarah Zale this month. Katie will share with us the beauty of poetry in all writing as well as her publishing journey and poems from her recently released chapbook. Start the New Year with us as we continue our writing journey choosing the words that tell our stories and engage our readers.

Katie Sarah Zale teaches writing in Tucson and works with Art for Justice projects. She has published academic journal articles, a biography, short stories, and three collections of poetry. She believes in the power the arts to transform and heal ourselves and the world. While earning her MFA at Goddard College, she served as editor of the college journal, which included prose, poetry, photography, and paintings. With hopes of persuading the Washington State Supreme Court to abolish the death penalty, she and co-editor Terry Persun published the anthology, Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty. She has published two books and one chapbook of her own poetry. The Art of Folding (Plain View Press) was inspired by travels to Israel and Palestine. Sometimes You Do Things (Aquarius Press, Living Detroit Series) highlights the history and rebuilding of Detroit, where she was born and raised. In this collection, her poem “September 24, 1930: The Last Hanging in Michigan” was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as a finalist in the 2011 Split This Rock Poetry Contest. The chapbook Explain the Moon to Me (Moonstone Press) came out this year.