Linda Rabben debut poetry collection: BOOK OF CHANGES

Linda Rabben launches her debut poetry collection, Book of Changes, at Bird in Hand, in a full-community celebration with 5 local poets: Liz Hazen, Traci O’Dea, Sam Schmidt, Virginia Crawford, and Steven Leyva. Poets reading in support of other poets is one of our favorite things, and we hope you’ll come out to join the festivities. An elegiac nature poet in the Imagist tradition, Rabben has been writing poems since she was nineteen and thoughtfully frames this poetry collection as a companion to her memoir, Journeywoman: A Writer’s Story.

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Virginia Crawford is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. In April 2021, Apprentice House Press published her full-length collection of poetry, questions for water. One reviewer said, “her work mines the seam between the personal and the political. Crawford brings her lyrical voice and intimate perspective to the challenges faced by twenty-first century families, America, and the world.” Previously her chapbook Touch was published by Finishing Line Press. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city, and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program. She has appeared at the CityLit Fest, the Baltimore Book Festival, The Gaithersburg Book Festival and others. She earned degrees in creative writing from Emerson College, Boston, and the University of St. Andrew’s, Scotland. She lives and writes in Baltimore,

Maryland. Website: www.virginiacrawford.com

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist who has published two collections of poetry and whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. She lives in Baltimore with her family. Website: https://elizabethhazen.com.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Traci O’Dea, a poetry editor for the literary journals Smartish Pace and MOKO: Caribbean Arts & Letters, is the author of two poetry collections: Waving (Assure Press, 2021) and

Restricted Movement (Scotland Street Press, 2021) for which she received a Seed Funding

Grant from Arthouse Jersey. Her work has appeared in Poetry, 32Poems, Unsplendid, The 

Fiddlehead, A Room of One’s Own, and other literary journals, as well as the anthology Where I See the Sun: Contemporary Poetry in the Virgin Islands. Website: www.traciodea.com.

Linda Rabben is an author, anthropologist and human rights activist. Book of Changes, her twelfth book, is a collection of her poems spanning 50 years. Her poems also have appeared in Texas Quarterly, Poetry and Audience, Pennsylvania Review, Gallery, Voices, Friends Journal and Practicing Anthropology. She has published eleven nonfiction books about human rights and other subjects, including the social history of stained glass in Baltimore. She is an associate research professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. Website: https://wordworker.net.

Sam Schmidt‘s books include Suburban Myths (Beothuk Books 2012) and Dark Bird (2024, Galileo Press). For more than a decade he edited and published WordHouse, a newsletter for Maryland writers, and hosted the reading series WordHouse at the Minás Gallery. His work has been published in such journals as Passager, Free State Review, and Gargoyle. He is a two-time recipient of the Maryland State Individual Artist Grant and has a master’s degree in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins University. Website: www.darkbirdpoetry.com.