Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton President 2740 Andrea Drive Allentown, PA 18103 USA marilynhazelton@rcn.com Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton is a poet and essayist. Living in diverse parts of the United States, as well as in Thailand, Hong Kong, Spain, and France has sharpened her sense of the need for poetry in this world. A teaching artist, she approaches poetry as a path for empathy, understanding, and awareness. As a military veteran, survivor of an abusive first marriage, and a bereaved parent, she believes that creative acts can lift us from deepest despair. While president of the Tanka Society of America, she would like to promote the reading and writing of tanka in education. Marilyn includes her maiden name with published work to remind herself of the working-class culture in which she was raised. There, women were to be seen sometimes and seldom heard. Currently, she lives and works in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with her husband of forty-one years and their two cats. Their oldest son, his wife, and two young daughters are in the Twin Cities; their youngest son and his husband live in Oakland. Marilyn is the editor and publisher of red lights, an international tanka journal. Her tanka have been published in Ribbons, Gusts, Magna Poets, moonset, Atlas Poetica, Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, Simply Haiku, moonbathing, Skylark, Bright Stars, Take Five (volumes 2, 3, 4), The Sacred in Contemporary Haiku, Beyond the Grave, and The Tanka Journal. family photo: my father’s father before the booze before the house was lost before we inherited fear                 Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 4 speaking of your courage and kindness 13 years later your brother brings you home again                 Beyond the Grave, Robert Epstein, editor poetry is the house I live in it teaches me how to be strong                 Ribbons, Winter 2014