I’m a Milotte Foundation scholar, past Centrum Wrtier-in-Residence, jazz musician with an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University . I am the author of three books of poems: the vanishings & other poems,(Calypso Editions, 2010), the dictator’s mistress (Alice Blue, 2011) and the practice of devotion (Goldfish Press, 2019).
I’m a mother and digital marketing professional. My son recently matriculated at Lehigh University where he is studying chemistry and biomimicry.
As one of the founders of Calypso Editions, I edited Piotr Florcyzyk’s translation of Anna Swir’s Building the Barricades & Other Poems, as well as other initial press titles., including a collection of short stories by Chekhov. My poetry has appeared in many literary journals and magazines. I
After a 30-year hiatus, I’m heading back into composing music, this time using a computer and exploring poetic soundscapes.
*
I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and spent my childhood in the lakes, fields, forests, mountains and islands of the Pacific Northwest. When I was five my parents got me a piano teacher and I started lessons because I kept coming home from rides to the grocery store and playing what I had heard on the radio on the piano. I studied and played jazz piano for the next twenty years.
In college I studied ecology, philosophy and English, thought about becoming a field biologist, and completed undergraduate work in English literature. In 1989 I started writing poetry. I read a lot, including most of the poetry collection in the Berkeley public library in those years.
About the same time I took a writing workshop at the San Francisco Zen Center. It was an AIDS hospice at that point and the energy there was intense and unmistakable. I remember little about the workshop, but began a Zen meditation practice shortly therafter, which continues today.
Elizabeth Myhr 