Rasma Haidri

Once upon a time in Tennessee a girl found a cast-off half-filled notebook from her father's PhD dissertation and felt called by the blank page. She watched him fill a fountain pen and fell in love with the instrument. She watched him writing in the late night house and was allured by solitude. The girl's mother wrote lines on a piece of paper then read them aloud, and the girl discovered poetry. Thus the love of writing was handed down to me.

I have worked as an educator and reading specialist, authoring three textbooks and teaching students from middle school to college in Wisconsin, Hawaii and Norway. Now I write full-time in a little pine room in a house on an island off the Norwegian coast, a writer's hermitage equipped with a few blank pages and fountain pens and solitude.

My poems and essays have been widely anthologized and received several awards and recognitions including the Southern Women Writers Association award in creative non-fiction and The Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award.

I am currently working on a second poetry collection and a memoir.