Reading or writing, or both, could be two of your favorite activities. Books, and now, e-books, open up a whole world of new possibilities and exciting options. There are writers and there are writers. Some are inspirational, others irreverent, some funny and lopsided, others simply great! Here are some of our favorite authors:
Anna Marie Quindlen (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. Quindlen left journalism in 1995 to become a full-time novelist. In 1999, she joined Newsweek, writing a bi-weekly column until announcing her semi-retirement in the May 18, 2009 issue of the magazine. Quindlen is known as a critic of what she perceives to be the fast-paced and increasingly materialistic nature of modern American life. Much of her personal writing centers on her mother who died at the age of 40 from ovarian cancer, when Quindlen was 19 years old.
Th She has written five best-selling novels, three of which have been made into movies. One True Thing was made into a feature film in 1998 for which Meryl Streep received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Black and Blue and Blessings were made into television movies in 1999 and 2003 respectively.
Author: Object Lessons: New York, Ivy Books, 1991
Favorite Excerpts:
"People look at your children and they see them all in a lump. Even their father, calling them "the brood," herding them into the car for Mass every Sunday morning, making rules to fit them all, about staying out late, about homework, about spankings if they got into trouble... But their mother never sees them that way. Even now, all standing together, men in their suits, too big to hug, you see them all as themselves, clear."
Dr. Gordon Livingston (www.gordonlivingston.com) was
born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in upstate New York.
He attended the U.S. Military Academy and upon graduation
as an infantry officer was trained as a parachutist and an
Army Ranger. He served for two years in the 82nd Airborne
Division before attending medical school at Johns Hopkins
from which he graduated in 1967. He interned at Walter Reed
General Hospital before volunteering for Vietnam where he
served as the Regimental Surgeon for the 11th Armored
Cavalry Regiment. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor.
While in Vietnam he registered a public protest against the war
and subsequently left the Army. He trained in adult and child
psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He is a parent twice bereaved
and his first book, Only Spring, described the death from
leukemia of his six-year-old son. He is the author of the bestseller, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, which is now in its sixth printing.
He has been published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Readers Digest, the San Francisco Examiner, The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. He is the father of four grown children and lives with his wife Clare King in Columbia, MD where he continues to practice psychiatry.
Author: Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: New York, Marlowe & Company, 2004
Favorite Excerpts:
" Over the many years I have spent listening to people's stories, especially all the ways in which things can go awry, I have learned that our passage through life consists of an effort to get the maps in our heads to conform to the ground on which we walk. Ideally, this process takes place as we grow. Our parents teach us primarily, by example, what they have learned. Unfortunately, we are seldom wholly receptive to these lessons. And often, our parents' lives suggest to us that they have little useful to convey, so that much of what we know comes to us through the frequently painful process of trial and error."
Charlson L. Ong (www.goodreads.com) , resident fellow of the Institute of Creative Writing and fictionist/scriptwriter/singer extraordinaire, was born on July 6, 1960. He obtained an A.B. in Psychology from the University of the Philippines in 1977, and currently teaches literature and creative writing under UP's Department of English and Comparative Literature. He has joined several writers' workshops here and abroad, and has acquired numerous grants and awards for his fiction, including the Palanca, Free Press, Graphic, Asiaweek, National Book Award, and the Dr. Jose P. Rizal Award for Excellence. His novel, Embarrassment of Riches published by UP Press in 2002, won the Centennial Literary Prize. In addition to this, Ong has served as co-editor of the Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction. His short stories range from parodies of well-loved Filipino texts to insightful treatments of Chinese-Filipino culture. These have been collected into Men of the East and Other Stories (1990 and 1999), Woman of Am-Kaw and Other Stories (1993) and Conversion and Other Fictions (1996). His second novel is due for publication this year.
Author: Blue Angel, White Shadow: Manila, UST Publishing House, 2004.
Favorite Excerpts:
He was seven years old when his father, Tiak Lang, drowned in the river behind their ancestral home. It was the boy's job to look after his father when he wandered the streets. Should Tiak Land wander too far from home or go near the river, Robert was supposed to lead him back home, or else rush back to tell his mother, or uncle, or grandfather. But that day, he was in bed with a fever, he had been ill for two days, and his mother was minding him. It was his uncle Antonio, he was later told, who should have been with Tiak Lang. As a boy he was told that his father had lost his spirit because of a curse that some sorcerer had placed on him back in China. His father was said to have lost his senses slowly until he lived inside a fog and leapt into the river with no one noticing."
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Philip Yancey (born 1949) (Wikipedia) is an American
Christian author. Fourteen million of his books have been
sold worldwide, making him one of the best-selling
evangelical Christian authors. Two of his books have won
the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award: The Jesus I
Never Knew in 1996, What's So Amazing About Grace in
1998. He is published by Zondervan Publishing and
Hachette. Yancey was born in Atlanta and grew up in
nearby suburbs. When Yancey was one year old, his
father, stricken with polio, died after church members suggested he go off life support in faith that God would heal him. This and other negative experiences with a rigid church contributed to Yancey's losing his faith at one point of time. After high school he attended a Bible College, where he met his wife, Janet. His two graduate degrees in Communications and English were earned from Wheaton College Graduate School and the University of Chicago.
Author: Prayer: Does It Make a Difference? Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan, 2006
Favorite Excerpts:
" In the process of becoming an adult, I have learned to conduct human relationships in a way that at first blush may seem inauthentic. When I get poor service at a restaurant, I don't throw a temper tantrum and break the dishes like a two-year-old. Talking on the telephone, I try to sound polite even when the caller has just interrupted me. I show up at work whether I like it or not. I look for ways to be attentive to my wife even when I'm more aware of my own needs. In other words, all relationships involve an act of will, and I likewise persevere through difficult times in prayer despite my feelings at the moment. Sometimes, I come to God out of sheer determination of will, which may seem inauthentic. When I do so however, I need not put on a mask. God already knows the state of my soul. I am not telling God anything new, but I am bearing witness to my love for God by praying even when I don't feel like it. I express my underlying faith simply by showing up."
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Junot Díaz (Wikipedia) (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review.
Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience.; Diaz has
remarked of his interest in the immigrant experience: "I, as a
writer, find myself trying as best as I can to describe not only
the micro-culture that I grew up in, but some of what that
leads to." He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his
novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” in 2008. He
is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.
Author: This is How You Lose Her: New York, Riverhead Books, 2012
Favorite Excerpts:
"That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads. Girls were starting to take notice of me; I wasn't good looking, but I listened and had boxing muscles in my arms. In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world, I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead."
Hope Is The Thing
With Feathers
By Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
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Emily Dickinson, born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of the premier American poets of the 19th century. She is an American poetess who died at the age of 56.
Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
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Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did You want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
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Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning African American poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 8 1928 and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 28, 2014. Angelou was also a dancer, an actress and a singer.is is paragraph text. Double click here to edit and add your own text.
A Better Resurrection
by Sylvia Plath
I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.
Words
by Sylvia Plath
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
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It may be surprising that the iconic poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote extensively and evocatively of death and suicide in her poetry, left a note of only four words before taking her own life.
Sylvia Plath’s suicide note said simply “Please call Dr. Horder” — along with this doctor’s phone number. The debate has stirred ever since — was her suicide intentional, or a cry for help? Could this even be considered a suicide note at all?
When Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February of 1963, it wasn’t the first time she had tried to take her own life. Ten years earlier, she overdosed on pills in the cellar of her mother’s house. And the summer before she died, she drove her car into a river.
In early 1963, Sylvia was living in a flat in London with the two young children she had with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The couple was separated. Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill since the summer before.
Sarojini Naidu, (born as Sarojini Chattopadhyaya) also known by the sobriquet as The Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist and poet. Naidu was one of the formers of the Indian Constitution. Naidu was the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the Governor of Uttar Pradesh state. Her birthday is celebrated as women's day all over India.
This is paragraph text. Double click here to edit and add your own text.
Life
by Sarojini Naidu
CHILDREN, ye have not lived, to you it seems
Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams,
Or carnival of careless joys that leap
About your hearts like billows on the deep
In flames of amber and of amethyst.
Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist
Till some resistless hour shall rise and move
Your hearts to wake and hunger after love,
And thirst with passionate longing for the things
That burn your brows with blood-red sufferings.
Till ye have battled with great grief and fears
And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years,
Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife,
Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.
Remember
by Christina Rossetti
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
T Mary Oliver is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, [America's] best-selling poet. Oliver’s first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. n text.
TThere is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.
There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.
I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?
He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest.
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last forever:
I was wrong.
~W.H. Auden -.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
~Lord Byron -
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~W.B. Yeats-
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
~Emily Dickinson
… so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.
~Pablo Neruda-
… so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.
~Pablo Neruda-
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
~David Whyte-
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay-
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot-
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words that dance between people
& for me, it will always be this way,
walking in the light,
remembering being alive together
~Brian Andreas
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
~Anne Sexton
…my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
~ ee cummings-
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay-
Tto live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
-Mary Oliver-
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver-
The WHWS Poetry Snapshot Calendar (sized 8'x11' 12 pages) contains the above images for each month, OR you may choose to get a set of 17 postcards instead.
WHWS Poetry Snapshot Calendar 2021
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
He was my North, my South, my East and West.
Hope is the thing with
feathers That perches in the soul,
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
so I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
We were so wholly one I had not thoughtThat we could die apart. I had not thoughtThat I
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words
I will remember the kisses
Our lips raw with love
and how you gave me everything
anywhere
I go my heart) I am never without it you go, my dear; and whatever is
Watch for the future inclusion of a poetry corner that will happily accept contributions from our readership!
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Preside Allende is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Author: Of Love and Shadows
Favorite Excerpts:
All men are brothers. But that isn't true; any man who goes around spreading violence is no brother of mine, and the nation comes first, everything else isn't worth shit; and if we don't kill them, they'll kill us. That’s what the colonels say: kill or be killed, this is war, these things have to be done, pull up your pants and don't tremble, don't think, don't feel, and above all don't look at the man’s face, because if you do, you're fucked good and proper. “Fire!”
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize (twice), Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure.
Author: The Handmaid's Tale
Favorite Excerpts:
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
