Nancy Dunlop
Nancy Dunlop's poetry collection, Hospital Poems, has been described as "an explosive new book [which] portrays mental patients shining with the light of humanity."
Hospital Poems describes the patients she met while she was committed to an inpatient psychiatric hospital. These patients were not just patients, but people, with unique personalities, vitality, intelligence, and humor. And if this book can do anything, it is to remind folks that everyone has vulnerabilities, many of which are invisible and kept secret. But they don't need to be secret. They can be talked about. And what a relief talking can be. And even if mental illnesses and mental hospitals are still presented as little more than horror movie fodder, they are a reality. A big reality for many many people.
Nancy has been a published poet and essayist for 40 years. A finalist in the AWP Intro Journal Awards, she has been published in a number of print and digital journals, including Swank, alterra, Truck, Green Kill Broadsheet, as well as anthologies including The Little Magazine, 13th Moon: A Feminist Literary Magazine, Writers Resist: The Anthology, and Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on Madness and Chaos Within. Her work has also been heard on NPR.
She received her M.A. in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her Ph.D. in English Literature and Writing at SUNY Albany, where she specialized in Creative Writing and Poetics. She has also held summer residencies at Yale University and Oxford, where she researched the poetry of H.D. and the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, respectively. She happily taught English and Humanities at SUNY Albany for 25 years.
Nancy now lives in Upstate New York, in a little brown house with her husband and two cats, surrounded by old-growth pine trees and visitors (in size order) of moles, chipmunks, squirrels, possum, raccoons, fox, and a whole lot of deer. She is a frequenter of coffee shops and taco joints, where she continues to write essays and poetry, which push the envelope in bringing secrets into the light of day.
Nancy and her husband run a small design press called Passerine Press, purveyors of high quality collage postcards combining visual art and text. More information can be found at passerinepress.com.
