Tana Miller, during a thirty-year teaching career, has authored language arts curriculum guides for her school district, co-founded and facilitated a grade 5–8 annual literary magazine, presented whole language workshops in Hudson Valley schools and at the New York State Reading Conference. Tana co-founded and participated as a volunteer for ten years at a book group at Danbury Federal Prison for Women in Danbury, Connecticut. Since her retirement she has been an active volunteer at several food pantries and soup kitchens as well as an activist for the cause of racial justice. Her poetry has been published in several feminist journals and in Writing in A Woman’s Voice, Slant of Light (Codhill Press), An Apple in Her Hand (co-author, Codhill Press), and Rethinking the Ground Rules (co-author, Mediacs Books). She has taught creative writing as well as memoir writing at Lifespring Institute, Saugerties, New York. Tana cannot remember one day in her life when she didn’t spend some time reading. She also considers her flock of eleven grandchildren as the most interesting people she knows.
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English where she taught autobiography, creative writing, American and contemporary literature, Women’s Literature, and Holocaust Literature courses. Her work has been published in many journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Broadkill Review, Cream City Review, Home Planet News, Kansas Quarterly, Memoir (and), Vassar Review, and Westchester Review. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge, 2000). In addition, she co-authored with Laurence Carr an anthology of women’s writing from the Hudson Valley: A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill, 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for an anthology. One chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press. Her full-length volume, Foraging for Light, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. Recently a chapbook about the life of Bess Houdini, Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini, was published by Palooka Press. Her poetry has been anthologized in An Apple in Her Hand (co-author, Codhill Press), Rethinking the Ground Rules (co-author, Mediacs Books). She has taught creative writing as well as memoir writing at Lifespring Institute, Saugerties, New York. She has been a frequent reader of her poetry at venues in the Hudson Valley.
Paperback: 58 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (July 6, 2024)
Publicity:
Fall for Poetry with Kelsay Books Authors of the Hudson Valley (Reading, November, 2024)