“Some poems are good medicine. and some “good medicine poems” are mindfulness poems.” So say Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson, both members of the South Dakota State Poetry Society, who are celebrating the recent publication of Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems. Cole-Dai, a resident of Brookings, and Wilson, who lives in …
Christine Stewart-Nuñez, an associate professor of English at South Dakota State, writes poems that are often narrative and often about her family, including the death of her sister (in Keeping Them Alive) and her own experience as a mother of a child with special needs (in the forthcoming Bluewords Greening). Her poems always pay close …
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Marcella Remund, who lives in Vermillion and teaches at USD, has been writing poems for years but only recently begun publishing. Drawing on rich religious and cultural tradition, her poems are concerned with language, feminism, and emotion. Here’s a poem of hers from the online journal Stirring, from Sundress Publications: RELIC I keep this shard …
Many people admit to thinking of only cowboy poetry when considering poetry from South Dakota, so I’ve focused on many non-cowboy poets so far; I’ve also been doing them in alphabetical order, so it’s taken a while to get to my very favorite cowboy poet, Bruce Roseland. I worry about that adjective being too limiting, …
South Dakota’s current Poet Laureate, Lee Ann Roripaugh teaches in and runs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota. She’s published three books of poetry and one that’s harder to characterize but walks the line between poetry and lyric creative nonfiction. Her first book won the National Poetry Series, and she’s also …
Staci Schoenfeld is a relatively new South Dakotan, a transplant from Florida via Kentucky who’s here to get her Ph.D. from USD. She hasn’t yet published a full-length collection, so I have less information from which to draw my sweeping generalizations in this introduction, but I’ll proceed anyway. She’s already well-lauded, though, with a 2015 …
Creative writing professor at Augustana University, Patrick Hicks published a touching and honest portrayal of adoption in 2014, his book Adoptable (Salmon Press). One of my favorite poems from that book is up at The Poetry Foundation: The Strangers By Patrick Hicks After we picked you up at the Omaha airport, we clamped you into …
She’s not going to be a South Dakotan much longer, because she got a teaching gig in Texas, so I thought I’d give a shoutout to Sara Henning while she’s still our neighbor! I’m particularly fond of her poem “The Color of Ashes,” available at The Superstition Review: The Color of Ashes “We all live …
The South Dakota Poet Laureate until last year (2015), Evans has an understated, imagistic aesthetic that is deceptively simple. His poetic voice is deeply rooted in concern for the natural world and in exploring how humans encounter nature. It’s a great example of what South Dakotan poetry can be in the 20th and 21st centuries. …
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I’m a fan of Jeanne Emmons’s poetry in general, and though the poems in Rootbound are my favorites, a good poem of hers that you can access easily online is “The Poetry Class at The Girl’s Club” from The Glove of the World at her publisher’s website, The Backwaters Press: The Poetry Class at …
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