Author Archives: Leslie Schultz

News Flash! I Am Reading at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse on September 4, 2018. Bonus! Blue Heron Photographs by Karla Schultz

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Great Blue Heron at Lunch near Clayton, GA (photo: Karla Schultz)

I am quite thrilled to be reading from Cloud Song in beautiful Winona, Minnesota on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 7:00 p.m., as part of their First Tuesdays Laureate Writers Series sponsored by the River Arts Alliance!

Tim and I were recently in Winona to listen as the 2018 Maria W. Faust winning sonnets were read. They were quite exceptional and inspiring, as you can see.  Afterward, we went to the Blue Heron for lunch–perhaps the best egg salad sandwich I’ve ever eaten. While there, I snapped a few photos. Afterwards, I asked my fabulously talented sister, Karla, if she had any photographs of blue herons from her part of the country (the wild areas of Georgia and Florida), and she sent a number of excellent “captures.” I have mixed them up with scenes of the wildlife (!) of Winona, visitors to Winona, and even a couple from our nearby Lyman Lakes. See if you can tell which is which!

If you are free on September 4 and in the mood for create coffee and poetry, please join us at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse.

Outside the Coffeehouse, An Anything-But-Blue Heron

Self-Portrait with the Blue Heron’s Blue Heron

Thank you, Karla! 

LESLIE

Blue Heron on the Carleton Campus

Blue Heron at Lyman Lakes

Sharing Good News: Poet Stella Nesanovich and “Everyday Grace”

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Stella Nesanovich‘s work has been an inspiration to me for some years, and I was thrilled when she agreed to provide a blurb for Cloud Song earlier this year.

Today, I want to share with you some of the well deserved accolades she is receiving for her poem, “Everyday Grace,” first published in 2016 in Third Wednesday, (and later as their poem of the week), as well as on the websites of the Poetry Foundation, and  Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.

“Everyday Grace” reminds the reader of what each of us knows in our own particular way: that there is opportunity for a deepening awareness of meaning in each seemingly mundane moment.

Stella Nesanovich , a lifelong Louisianan and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, was born in New Orleans, won degrees from Louisiana State University, and taught English for many years at McNeese State University in Lake Charles. Stella’s body of work is inspiring to me. At once contemplative and vigorously rendered, her poems explore those intersections of daily life, observation and reflection, and deepening understanding while always delivering pleasure of sound and sense coming together in a fresh way. I feel very lucky to know her work and to count her among my treasured “friends of the work.”

LESLIE

Franciscan University of Steubenville Press

Xavier Review Press, 2004

Yellow Flag Press, 2014

Yellow Flag Press, 2015