Joan Cusack Handler

A Bronx native, Joan Cusack Handler has four published poetry collections--GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, Confessions of Joan the Tall, and Orphans, as well as two anthologies that she's edited: The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, Vol.1 and The Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep You Company, Vol.1. Recipient of five Pushcart nominations and a Sampler Award from The Boston Review, Handler's poems have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Poetry East, and The New York Times, and her prose, including chapters from Confessions of Joan the Tall, in Indiana Review and Southern Humanities Review. Her essay, Poems and the Psyche: the Threat of Making Art: One Writer's Journey was published in Tampa Review. In all of her literary work, Handler's aesthetic project is the exploration of voice--its evolution and recreation on the page. In her other lives, she's founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press Ltd. and a psychologist in clinical practice.

A Personal Note:

I've always been interested in people's stories--we all have them--and my choice of reading material reflects that. My preference is for character-driven rather than plot-driven work-not surprising given my psychology background. The psychological and emotional underpinnings of human experience are at the heart of what I write and what I read. Hence, my devotion to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Maugham, Hemingway, Whitman.... I'm in the process of rereading all (as many as I can) of the works that I read or neglected while in college, and I'm thrilled with what each has to offer to me and to the endless study of what it is to be human. These were brilliant writers and brilliant psychologists. Problem is, now I'm neglecting contemporary work. I need a few more lives.