Mixtape

The poems in Mixtape: Marginal States bear witness to members of our human family who exist just outside the mainstream of society. In these portrayals, we see individuals struggling with homelessness, those uprooted from their native countries, such as asylum seekers, and others dealing with altered or challenging psychological states-states which anyone of us might occupy at some time during our lives. The hope of bearing witness is to foster compassion and inclusion, human needs shared by all.

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"Mixtape: Marginal States is not for the timid. Rather, it's for the bold lover of poetry, those who welcome the lyrical of society's joys and traumas....while finding the balance where hope challenges anguish, and the fear of apocalypse is quelled."

-K-B GRESSITT, publisher/ co-founding editor of Writers Resist

"Powerful poems of witness"

-RON SALISBURY, San Diego Poet Laureate (2020-2021)

"... these may very well be the individuals that we most need to meet; to read their stories recorded in a variety of shifting poetic forms by the author....Souls, weathered to gray dull as the sky overhead. Hall shines a light on all of them, also illuminating the reader with a purpose in mind: for us to come/ back to our senses."

-ROBT O'SULLIVAN SCHLEITH, Escondido Arts Partnership and San Diego Poetry Annual regional editor

Debbie Hall is a former psychologist whose poetry has appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Arlington Literary Journal, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, and many other literary journals and anthologies. Her books include What Light I Have (2018, Main Street Rag Books), Falling into the River (2020, The Poetry Box) and In the Jaguar's House (2022, The Poetry Box), a book of wildlife photography and poems for children. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune. She holds an MFA in writing from Pacific University in Oregon and is a poetry editor with Writer's Resist. Her photography has been published in Orion, The National Humane Review (a 2009 photo contest winner), The San Diego Union Tribune, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine and in other literary journals.Instagram: @debbie.hall.poet.photog