JUDY HALEBSKY

Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Miller Williams Prize. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she holds an M.F.A. in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. Judy’s work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her book Sky=Empty won the New Issues Prize, and her chapbook  Space/Gap/Interval/Distance won the Poets-Under-Forty Award from Sixteen Rivers Press. Tree Line was shortlisted for five awards including the Believer Poetry Award and the California Book Award. Along with  poetry, Halebsky also writes articles, essays, plays, and performs live improvised stories.

At Dominican University of California, she teaches Japanese literature, poetry, and live storytelling. She lives in Berkeley with her nature guide and young daughter.

About Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged):

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

“Halebsky likes the unleashed energy of poetry, and in the poems gathered here, she delivers.” —Billy Collins

“Under the spell of Bashō’s haiku, but written in a voice entirely its own, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) is the first book of poetry I’ve read in years that makes civilization look good. It makes me want to make dinner, make love, and make noise. Only a poet this generous, this wise, and this rich in language could have made this splendid thing. Read this book and you will wish you were her neighbor.”
—Katy Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News

NICHOLE TURNBLOOM

Nichole Turnbloom is the author of Out of the Unexpected: Poems with Sappho. She has an MFA in poetry and completed a facilitation training through the Institute for Poetic Medicine. Her poems have been published in Acumen, California Quarterly, The Branches, Garlic Press Lit, Luna Luna Magazine, Bear Review, IWWG’s Anthology Write Forward among other venues. Her work is informed by nearly twenty years of providing somatic therapy to those affected by complex trauma and delves into themes of spiritual fragmentation, identity and longing.

About OUT OF THE UNEXPECTED: POEMS WITH SAPPHO

In Out of the Unexpected, Nichole Turnbloom reaches into the fragments of Sappho—poet, musician, teacher, the Tenth Muse—and weaves a luminous dialogue between past and present, voice and silence, myth and memory.

Drawing from lost lines and broken songs, these poems are a testament to what remains, what is remade, and what longs to be spoken. Here, the resonance of Sappho’s lyricism mingles with the raw pulse of modern grief, rage, tenderness, and survival. Through correspondence, reimagining, and reflection, Turnbloom invites readers to step into a timeless conversation—one stitched with longing, beauty, and unyielding truth.