Anita Gevaudan Byerly
USA
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Anita Gevaudan Byerly, author of the chapbook,
OctoberLight (Finishing Line Press, 2008), is a
resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a single parent, she raised
two children while working as a secretary, and then went back to
school at age fifty. She graduated summa cum laude from the
University of Pittsburgh with a degree in English Writing. Byerly
worked as Poet-in-Residence at St. Edmund’s Academy, an elementary
school in Pittsburgh, for eight years. She is a Fellow of the
Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, through which she taught at
the Young Writer’s Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and
served on the editorial staff of Riverspeak.
She is also a member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop,
the Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania Poetry Societies, and Tea Time
Ladies, a performance poetry ensemble which performed in Pittsburgh
and the surrounding area from 1992 -1998.
Her
honors include awards from In Pittsburgh Newsweekly,
Negative Capability“Eve of St. Agnes,”
yawp, and the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage
Festival. Byerly’s work has appeared in journals such as
5AM,
The Ledge, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Loyalhanna
Review, Earth's Daughters,
the 1999 and 2000 Sandburg-Livesay Anthologies, the Pittsburgh
anthology, Along These Rivers, and online at
PoetryMagazine.com and poetrypoetry.net.
Byerly read from two of her poems in a recent short film by
Tony Buba, Ode to a Steeltown. In
2004, she was nominated for the Mary Roberts Rhinehart Award in
Poetry. Her first chapbook, Digging a
Hole to China, was published in 2001.
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Out of Focus
In the darkened room,
the vacuum becomes an intruder,
the ironing board, a ghost.
The hanging plant is a giant
flying insect, the lamp shade,
a Chinese coolie hat.
When my school friend calls,
I picture her at seventeen,
not an older woman,
frail from dialysis.
At eighty, my mother asked
if the people inside the TV
were talking to her.
She could see them;
they must see her, too.
In the foggy morning, trees blur,
become a choir of whispering nuns,
gray habits hiding naked limbs.
It is the edges that shift
and change with time.
When I glance into the mirror,
I see my mother’s face.
from October Light Chapbook,
Finishing Line Press
Page 2
©
Copyright,
Anita Gevaudan Byerly.
All Rights Reserved. |