Lola Haskins

Lola Haskins’ poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her ten collections of poems include The Grace to Leave (Anhinga, 2012), Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2004), Extranjera (Story Line, 2001), Hunger, University of Iowa, 1993, Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990), and Castings (Countryman, 1989). Her prose includes Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women illustrated by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook) , Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner's Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters) and Fifteen Florida Cemeteries: Strange Tales Unearthed (University Press of Florida, 2011). Her poems have been broadcast on BBC radio and NPR. She often collaborates with musicians (a performance of Paul Richards' settings of some of her Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano is forthcoming in 2013; a choral performance composed by Willis Bodine finished the 2012 UF choral festival), dancers (she wrote words for and played the speaking Mata Hari, in Dance Alive!'s full-length ballet of that title; in addition, she has performed several mixed media pieces at The Hippodrome State Theater in Gainesville), and visual artists (her “stories” were incorporated by Ken Kerslake of the UF art faculty in prints, and collected in an artist-designed accordion book; her collaboration with Collagist Derek Gores was exhibited at the Broward Art Museum). Ms. Haskins has recently finished How Small, Confronting Morning, plein air poetry set in North Central Florida, and is working on a mansuscript of poems about insects. She retired in 2005 from the Computer Science Department at UF and is entering her eighth year on the faculty of Rainier Writer's Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, WA.