Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

Former 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