In Conversation: Fleda Brown & Anne-Marie Oomen

Emotional openness. An invitation to think together. Fleda Brown and Anne-Marie Oomen aren’t just contemporaries; they’re friends and deep admirers of each other’s work.

Fleda says that she can “trust Anne-Marie’s poems and prose to struggle admirably with the same issues I struggle with–how to say it, how it was, including the ambient sounds and textures. There is no posturing in her work.” And Anne-Marie says “Fleda’s poems invite me to think with her, to watch the spirals of thought we all experience–but she finds a way to reveal how they just might be insights to daily life.”

Both acclaimed poets and essayists, Fleda and Anne-Marie are also both teachers, Michganders, and friends. They admire one another’s work because they see and listen deeply and make space for each other to explore the written word in various forms. There’s something magical about creatives who are so knowledgeable about each other’s work, and that’s the kind of conversation this promises to be: intimate, warm, curious and generous. We hope you’ll join us.

About Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown’s Doctor of the World ((forthcoming this March)I won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024. Her eleventh full-length collection, The End of the Clockwork Universe will be out from Carnegie-Mellon University Press this fall. Previously, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and was an Indie finalist. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has won the New Letters and the Ohio State Univ/ The Journal awards for creative nonfiction. Her third collection of memoir-essays, Mortality, with Friends was published by Wayne State University Press (2021) was an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, where she writes a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper. She is retired from the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.

About Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen received the Michigan Author Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2023-24. As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), Michigan Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY award. The Long Fields, (Cornerstone Press), is her most recent essay collection. Love, Sex and 4-H, (Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, (Michigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture. She wrote Uncoded Women (poetry) and co-wrote the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid and Lake Huron Mermaid with poet, Linda Nemec Foster. She also edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (Michigan Notable Book). She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, winner of the CTAM contest. She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president and current board member of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, have built their handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan, and beloved Lake Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com

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