An Apple in Her Hand : A Collection from the Hudson Valley Women's Writing Group

A collection of poetry and prose by a Hudson Valley based group of women writers.

The authors of this collection are seven older women from diverse backgrounds who are members of a long-standing Hudson Valley writing group composed of academics, a social worker, a psychiatric nurse, a teacher, and a lawyer. Some are retired, some are still working, some are musicians. All are volunteers, activists, and artists. The sections of the book Remembrance, Joy, Visibility, Resistance, Resilience, Transformation, Aging, and Bearing Witness grew from the authors individual passions and from their collective perspective of being women-of-a-certain-age in a culture that tends to render older women invisible, irrelevant. This collection is filled with honest, insistent poetry and prose that demands to be heard by readers of all ages, genders, and perspectives.

Colleen Geraghty is a professional social worker, musician, and artist. She is a certified Amherst Writer and Artists facilitator, founder of The Story Cottage, and regular presenter/facilitator at numerous writers festivals and conferences, including Women at Woodstock. She facilitates regular writing workshops, Story Cottage and Story Cottage Words, at local and out-of-state venues. Her stories and poems have appeared in Wallkill Valley Writers Anthology 2012 and 2013 and in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Her story, The Beer House (included in this book), received first prize in the Hudson Valley Writers Guild 2013 Short Story Contest.

Kit Goldpaugh taught writing for over for over thirty years in the Hudson Valley to students ranging in age from middle school to college. Over that time, she participated in the Bard Institute for Thinking and Writing program, the Hudson Valley Writers Workshop, and was awarded both a FIPSI summer grant on composition and an NEH fellowship on Women and Fiction. Kit has read at local poetry reading events.

Eileen Howard is a retired psychiatric nurse, an active writer and photographer as well as an active hiker and lover of nature. She lived in California, Hawaii, and Nova Scotia before landing in New England and then the Hudson Valley. Many of Eileen s poems bring a photographic lens to the natural beauty of our environment. She has done readings at local Hudson Valley events.

During a thirty-year career as a teacher, Tana Miller authored language curriculum guides for her school district, cofounded and facilitated a grade 5 8 annual literary magazine, presented award-winning Whole Language workshops in Hudson Valley public schools and at the New York State Reading Conference. Her work has been published in several feminist journals and in A Slant of Light (Codhill Press). Tana was a selected reader at the Newark Public Library and has been a featured reader at local gatherings, libraries, and book stores.

A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary K. O Melveny commutes between Woodstock, New York, and Washington, DC. Mary s poetry has appeared in various print and online journals as well as on various blog sites such as Women at Woodstock, Writing in a Woman s Voice, and The New Verse News. Her work has been awarded recognition in several national writing contests; her poem Cease Fire (included in this book) won the 2017 Raynes Poetry Competition. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Woman of a Certain Age (Finishing Line Press, September, 2018).

A SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt s work has been published in many literary journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review and Kansas Quarterly, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. Jan coedited, with Laurence Carr, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Jan has authored two poetry volumes published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She Had This Memory, 2000). Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press.

Kappa Waugh recently retired after twenty happy years as Reference Librarian for Vassar College. She was born into a family of writers and began her own writing as a young woman. Kappa s poetry was published in school and college literary journals and, during her twenties, in BlackRock. More recently, Kappa s work has appeared in three editions of Legacies, in a poetry anthology, and in A Slant of Light, and on the blog site Writing in a Woman s Voice. Kappa has read at