Susan Weaver

Ribbons Editor

127 N. 10th St.

Allentown, PA 18102 USA

Susan Weaver is a former feature writer and editor with special interests in cycling and active travel. Her eight years of staff experience at Bicycling magazine, where she became managing editor, were bookended with periods of freelancing. Between assignments, she taught as a poet in the schools, worked weekends at a shelter for victims of domestic violence, and explored local back roads on her bicycle. She also enjoyed bike travel in Europe, Canada, and the United States, and wrote about it for Adventure Cyclist and other magazines. Initially, she found her poetic voice in free verse, as an outlet for feelings about her work at the women’s shelter. Much later, she discovered the images, lyricism, and subtlety of tanka, and the versatility of tanka prose. She began submitting to Red Lights in 2009 and joined the Tanka Society of America in 2015. She became tanka prose editor for Ribbons in 2018. She is grateful to be engaged with this community of poets and with this poetic form that continually offers room for growth. Susan lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with her husband Joseph Skrapits, an artist and writer, and their two cats.

a land snail

under my daffodils

stretches forward

pearly house on its back

I forget my burdens

Atlas Poetica, “Tanka of Flowing Tranquility,” December 15, 2019

if I’d really listened

what might she have told me

one bough

scrapes another

in the wind

Honorable Mention, Member’s Choice Tanka, Ribbons, Fall 2020

like an aspen’s colony

from a single seedling

what you nurtured

in this life

. . . remains

Moonbathing, Fall/Winter 2015