News & Views

Because of Linda’s nursing background and strong belief in combining medicine and creative writing, she regularly visits classes of physician assistant students to lead discussions and writing workshops. Students relish the chance to write freely and creatively about topics such as their fears in regard to practicing medicine, or a medical procedure they have personally experienced or expect to experience. Two of Linda’s poems (“I Want To Tell My Daughter Not to Name the Cadaver” and “She Makes the First Cut”) have been anthologized in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review and were featured at “Reading the Body: Live!”, a literary evening of professional actors reading poems. The evening honored Frank Netter, “The Michelangelo of Medicine.”

Writing about place is another topic that reaches down to Linda’s core—those places carried so deeply that they seem to correspond with one’s bodily geography. In the same vein, her work appears in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. This is a topic that also carried Linda back to the Pennsylvania coal region and Mt. Carmel Area High School, her alma mater, to celebrate National Poetry Month with 88 honors students through a poetry reading and lively discussion. She read from her recently published chapbook, Minuscule Boxes in the Bird’s Bright Throat, which students read in advance. The collection revolves around a town much like theirs; a town that is, in fact, Linda’s version of their town. Linda developed a strong bond with these students over this shared place. This is one event she will never forget.