Zero Gravitas

Still Available on Amazon

Barbara Lydecker Crane has been creatively amusing herself all her life. Growing up in Short Hills, N.J., she was equally drawn to writing and art. Pursuing the latter, she majored in it at Skidmore College, where her senior project included a small edition of an original book entitled A Child’s Garden of Curses. Barb worked as a graphic designer and then for twenty years as a fabric artist, creating one-of-a-kind landscape quilts. In 1995 she was awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts Regional Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her quilts have been widely exhibited in group and solo shows, and are in corporate, museum and private collections.

To fend off the doldrums of New England winter in 2005, Barb took a poetry workshop given by Tom Daley that rekindled her fascination with wordcraft. Using rhyme and meter, she now delights in writing poems in both humorous and serious veins, usually for adults and sometimes for children.

In 2007 she founded “X.J. Kennedy & the Light Brigade,” a small troupe of light verse poets that has appeared at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and other venues. At the Concord Poetry Center she facilitates guest readings and open mikes. She is a member of the Concord Library Poetry Workshop and the Powow River Poet In Newburyport, MA.

Barb’s poems have been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. In 2011 she won the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest and an Honorable Mention in the Foley Poetry Contest. She lives in Somerville, MA with her husband; they have two married daughters and two young granddaughters. Zero Gravitas is her first book, and she hopes readers enjoy reading it as much as she enjoyed writing it.

Publisher: Kelsay Books/White Violet Press (July 17, 2012)