Mary Catherine Harper is a poet and Professor Emerita
of English and Humanities at Defiance College.
She co-organizes SwampFire with Dawn Burns.
The time and resources I put into SwampFire during 2018 have been made possible by the generous Individual Excellence Award funding of the Ohio Arts Council. The OAC is a state agency that funds and supports quality arts experiences to strengthen Ohio communities culturally, educationally, and economically.
2022 update: Check out my most recent publication, The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2022).
2018 update: I’m proud to have won the 2018 Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
Gwendolyn Brooks was an amazing poet, an amazing person.
Here's what the Poetry Foundation says about her.
Mary Catherine carving a bowl at 4 Corners Gallery, 14 July 2012
photo by Jennifer Creighton
Some designs I've created to work with poetry:
Here's the poem I used in the symmetrical design above
(on a marching mantis bed just for fun):
Smelling of melon and charred corn chips,
two old lovers came to me in a dream
describing poems they’d written
and squirreled away on flash drives
in case of famine to feed a starving heart.
Their verses spoke of Rorschach tests,
of beauty in the legs of insects anchored
to a spider's web, but I did not understand.
An image I can't get out of my head.
Toul Sleng needed all the dragonflies that fled.
To Hover Above the Universe
SwampFire, a haven for artists and writers . . . and other fellow creatures . . .
Insects on a sittin’ stump, SwampFire 2009
Sunsets still take my breath away, SwampFire 2008
Lead Screen . . . just because of the texture, SwampFire 2008
Students deep in writing . . . I still feel their thought buzz, SwampFire 2009
